UK Health Security Outbreak Monitor

Reads the UK Health Security Agency's (UKHSA) official "Outbreaks under monitoring" weekly reports directly from GOV.UK's public Content API (www.gov.uk/api/content/...) - no HTML scraping, no login, no key.

Each week UKHSA's epidemic intelligence team publishes a short structured report on disease events it is tracking worldwide: disease/pathogen, country or region, whether it is a new or updated signal, the reporting date window, a plain-English epidemiological summary (with links to WHO/ECDC/national sources), and an explicit assessment of the risk to the UK population. This Actor turns those weekly govspeak pages into one dataset row per disease/pathogen signal.

Why this Actor

No other Apify Store Actor reads UKHSA's own "outbreaks under monitoring" feed. It is not the same as the well-covered WHO "Disease Outbreak News" feed - it is UKHSA's own UK-focused risk read on global events, including signals WHO has not (yet) issued a DON for.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
year	integer (select)	2026	Which yearly index publication to read (2026 or 2025).
maxWeeks	integer	8	How many of the most recent weekly reports to fetch (newest first).
watchLabel	string	-	Optional tag copied onto every row, useful when scheduling.
maxItems	integer	500	Safety cap on total rows pushed.

Output (one row per disease signal)

{
  "type": "outbreak_signal",
  "watch_label": "daily-run",
  "report_title": "Outbreaks under monitoring: week 38 (week ending 20 September 2026)",
  "week_label": "The following signal relates to an ongoing outbreak, with data as of 21 September 2026",
  "disease": "Bundibugyo virus disease ( BVD )",
  "location": "Multi-country",
  "status": "Update",
  "reporting_date": "15 May to 21 September 2026",
  "summary": "On 15 May 2026, an outbreak of Ebola disease caused by Bundibugyo virus was declared...",
  "further_information": "Ebola: overview, history, origins and transmission ...",
  "source_url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/outbreaks-under-monitoring-in-2026/outbreaks-under-monitoring-week-38-week-ending-20-september-2026",
  "report_updated_at": "2026-09-24T15:30:06+01:00",
  "row_status": "ok",
  "message": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-28T12:00:00Z"
}

If a weekly report page has no disease-signal tables (a quiet week), one weekly_report_no_signals row is pushed instead, so you can tell "checked, nothing new" apart from "failed to fetch". If a page fails to fetch, one error row is pushed (free of charge) with row_status describing the failure kind (not_found, fetch_failed, bad_json, ...).

Source and legality

GOV.UK's Content API (https://www.gov.uk/api/content/...) is a documented, public JSON API (see content-api.publishing.service.gov.uk) that mirrors the same content shown on the public GOV.UK page - it is not a bypass of any access control. www.gov.uk/robots.txt does not disallow /api/ or the publication paths this Actor reads. No login, no API key, and no rate limit is stated for this API; the Actor makes a small, sequential number of requests per run (one for the year index, one per weekly report) and retries politely on transient failures.

Use cases

• Travel-health and occupational-health teams tracking global disease signals UKHSA itself has flagged as relevant to the UK.
• Journalists and researchers building a timeline of an ongoing outbreak (e.g. tracking the Bundibugyo virus disease case count across weeks).
• Insurance, logistics and NGO teams needing an early, UK-government-vetted read on emerging outbreaks before mainstream press coverage.