CDC Health Statistics Scraper

Extract public health data from the CDC's open data portal (data.cdc.gov). Access mortality causes, COVID-19 death counts, vaccination coverage, chronic disease indicators, birth rates, foodborne outbreaks, and diabetes surveillance data — 8 curated datasets with powerful filtering, sorting, and full pagination via the Socrata SODA API.

This Actor is designed for public health researchers, epidemiologists, data journalists, healthcare analytics teams, and anyone building applications that rely on authoritative US health statistics. Get structured JSON output ready for dashboards, statistical analysis, or RAG pipelines.

Key Features

Feature	Description
8 CDC datasets	Mortality, COVID-19, vaccinations, chronic disease, births, foodborne outbreaks, diabetes
Full-text search	Search across all fields with keyword queries
SQL-like filtering	Use Socrata $where clauses for precise filtering
Flexible sorting	Sort by any field, ascending or descending
Automatic pagination	Fetches all pages up to your maxResults limit
No API key required	Uses the free public Socrata SODA API

Available Datasets

Dataset	Description
Leading Causes of Death	Age-adjusted death rates by cause, state, and year
COVID-19 Deaths by Demographics	Provisional COVID-19 death counts by age, sex, and race
Vaccination Coverage (Children)	National and state-level childhood vaccination rates
Chronic Disease Indicators	State-level chronic disease indicators and risk factors
Birth Rates	Birth rates by age of mother, race, and Hispanic origin
Underlying Cause of Death (ICD-10)	Death counts and rates by ICD-10 codes
Foodborne Disease Outbreaks	National foodborne outbreak surveillance data
Diabetes Prevalence by County	County-level diagnosed diabetes prevalence

How to Scrape CDC Health Statistics

1. Go to this Actor's page on the Apify Store
2. Click "Start" to open the input configuration form
3. Select a Dataset — choose from 8 CDC datasets
4. Set search query (optional) — e.g., "heart disease" or "California"
5. Set filter expression (optional) — e.g., year='2023' AND state='California'
6. Set sort field (optional) — sort by any field in the dataset
7. Set Max Results — default: 5000, set to 0 for unlimited
8. Click "Start" to run the Actor
9. Download your data in JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Dataset tab

Input Example

{
    "dataset": "mortality_causes",
    "searchQuery": "heart disease",
    "filterExpression": "year='2021'",
    "sortField": "deaths",
    "sortDescending": true,
    "maxResults": 100
}

Output Example

{
    "year": "2021",
    "causeName": "Heart disease",
    "state": "California",
    "deaths": "65432",
    "aadr": "142.5",
    "source": "NCHS - Leading Causes of Death, United States"
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing:

Event	Price
Actor Start	$0.00005
Per result	$0.002

A typical run of 1,000 records costs approximately $2.00 in Actor fees plus minimal Apify compute costs.

Use Cases

• Public health research — Analyze mortality trends, disease prevalence, and vaccination coverage
• Epidemiology — Study cause-of-death patterns by state, age group, and demographic
• Healthcare analytics — Feed CDC data into dashboards and reporting tools
• Data journalism — Build visualizations of health trends for news stories
• Policy analysis — Compare health indicators across states for policy research
• RAG/LLM pipelines — Structured health data ready for AI-powered analysis

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape CDC data?

Yes. This Actor uses the official CDC Socrata Open Data API, which provides free public access to CDC datasets. The data is published by a U.S. government agency for public use. No authentication is required.

How Much Does It Cost to Scrape CDC Health Data?

See the pricing table above. At $0.002 per result, fetching 5,000 mortality records costs approximately $10.00 in Actor fees plus minimal Apify compute costs.

Can I export CDC data to Excel or CSV?

Yes. Apify supports exporting results in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and other formats directly from the Dataset tab after a run completes.

How often is the CDC data updated?

Update frequency varies by dataset. Mortality data is updated annually, COVID-19 data is updated weekly, and vaccination data is updated periodically. You can schedule this Actor to run at any interval.

What filter expressions can I use?

The Actor supports Socrata $where clause syntax, which is similar to SQL. Examples: year='2023', state='Texas' AND deaths > 1000, cause_name LIKE '%cancer%'. See the Socrata SoQL documentation for full syntax.

Other Scrapers by SeatSignal

• FDA OpenFDA Scraper — Extract FDA drug adverse events, labeling, and NDC data
• FDA Food Recalls Scraper — Extract FDA food recall enforcement reports
• Medicare Provider Scraper — Extract Medicare provider and facility data
• NIH Grants Scraper — Extract NIH research grant awards data
• ClinicalTrials Scraper — Extract clinical trial data from ClinicalTrials.gov

Legal Disclaimer

This Actor accesses publicly available data from the CDC's open data portal (data.cdc.gov) via the Socrata SODA API. The data is published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for public use. This Actor does not bypass any authentication or access controls. Users are responsible for ensuring their use of the data complies with applicable laws and regulations.

For questions or support, please open an issue on this Actor's page.