FDA Tobacco Problem Reports Scraper — Vape & E-Cig Safety Data

Extract consumer-reported tobacco problem reports from the FDA openFDA Tobacco Problem Report database. These are real-world safety signals submitted to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration about e-cigarettes, vapes, e-liquids, cigarettes, cigars, hookah, and smokeless tobacco — including the health problems experienced and the product malfunctions reported.

This Actor turns the openFDA tobacco endpoint into clean JSON, CSV, or Excel, ready for safety-signal analysis, regulatory monitoring, public-health research, or litigation support.

What you get

Field	Description
reportId	Unique FDA tobacco problem report ID
dateSubmitted	Date the report was submitted to FDA
tobaccoProducts	Product category/categories named in the report
reportedHealthProblems	Health problems experienced (e.g. Seizure, Headache, Burn)
reportedProductProblems	Product malfunctions reported (e.g. overheating, leaking)
nonuserAffected	Whether a non-user (bystander) was affected
numberHealthProblems	Count of distinct health problems in the report
numberProductProblems	Count of distinct product problems
numberTobaccoProducts	Count of products named in the report

Why this matters

Tobacco and vaping safety is a fast-moving regulatory and legal arena. Structured access to FDA problem reports lets you:

• Monitor safety signals for specific product types (e.g. spikes in e-cigarette seizure reports)
• Support regulatory and policy research with primary-source FDA data
• Power litigation and product-liability analysis with verifiable government records
• Feed dashboards and LLM agents with clean, query-ready safety data

How to scrape FDA tobacco problem reports

1. Click Try for free.
2. Choose your filters:
   • Health Problem — keep only reports mentioning a problem like Seizure or Burn.
   • Search Query (advanced) — optional raw openFDA Lucene expression, e.g. tobacco_products:"E-cigarette".
   • Max Results — cap the run, or set 0 for everything that matches.
3. Click Start and download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Example input

{
  "healthProblem": "Seizure",
  "maxResults": 500
}

Example output

{
  "reportId": 822,
  "dateSubmitted": "04/21/2019",
  "tobaccoProducts": "Electronic cigarette, electronic nicotine or vaping product",
  "reportedHealthProblems": "Seizure grand mal",
  "reportedProductProblems": "Other",
  "nonuserAffected": "No",
  "numberHealthProblems": 1,
  "numberProductProblems": 1,
  "numberTobaccoProducts": 1
}

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result pricing — a few cents per run for hundreds of structured reports, plus standard Apify compute. Far cheaper than building and maintaining your own openFDA integration.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The official openFDA Tobacco Problem Report API (api.fda.gov/tobacco/problem.json). Only public, de-identified report data is returned.

How fresh is the data? Each run queries openFDA live, so reports appear as soon as the FDA publishes them in the dataset.

Do I need an API key? No. The Actor uses the public, key-free openFDA endpoint and paginates within its limits.

Can I get the whole dataset? Yes — set maxResults to 0 to paginate through all available reports.

Other Actors

Working with FDA data? Combine this with our other FDA drug, device, recall, and openFDA scrapers on the Apify Store.

Legal

This Actor retrieves only publicly available, de-identified problem-report data published by the FDA via openFDA. It does not access personal data or bypass authentication. The openFDA data carries the FDA disclaimer that it should not be used as the sole basis for medical or regulatory decisions. You are responsible for compliant use of the output.