🐾 openFDA Animal & Veterinary Adverse Event Scraper

🚀 Export the U.S. veterinary pharmacovigilance dataset in seconds. Pull 1.3M+ adverse event reports filed with the FDA for animal drugs, with species, breed, age, weight, active ingredients, reactions, and outcomes. No API key, no registration, no manual CSV wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 27 fields per record · 🐶 1.3M+ reports · 🐾 6 species filters · 💊 Brand + ingredient search

The openFDA Animal & Veterinary Adverse Event Scraper exports the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine pharmacovigilance file and returns 27 structured fields per record, covering the animal, the product, the reaction, the outcome, and the original report metadata. The underlying corpus is the official U.S. registry of suspected adverse drug events in companion and food animals, sourced from veterinarians, drug sponsors, and pet owners.

The catalog covers dogs, cats, horses, cattle, pigs, and other species, every veterinary drug class on the U.S. market, and every reported reaction term from the international VeDDRA dictionary. This Actor makes that data downloadable as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under five minutes. All filters run server-side, so you skip the parser engineering entirely.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Veterinary pharma, pet insurance underwriters, clinical research teams, regulatory affairs analysts, vet schools, animal-health journalists	Pharmacovigilance signal detection, product safety dashboards, claims-risk modeling, label-change research, breed-specific reaction studies

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📋 What the openFDA Animal & Veterinary Scraper does

Five filtering workflows in a single run:

• 💊 Product / drug filter. Brand name or active ingredient (e.g. meloxicam, fipronil, spinosad).
• 🐾 Species filter. Dog, cat, horse, cattle, pig, or other.
• 🩺 Reaction term filter. Free-text VeDDRA term (e.g. vomiting, lethargy, pruritus).
• 📅 Date range filter. Earliest and latest report receive dates.
• 🌐 Full corpus export. Leave filters empty to stream the global event file.

Each record includes the unique adverse event report ID, animal demographics, primary product details, every drug administered, every reaction reported, outcomes, the reporter type, the receiving organization, and the full raw record for downstream re-parsing.

💡 Why it matters: veterinary adverse event signals are scattered across PDF labels, third-party reviews, and clinician anecdote. The FDA pool is the only structured registry. Building your own pipeline means handling pagination, search-syntax escaping, and quarterly schema drift. This Actor skips all of that.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
productName	string	""	Brand or active ingredient name. Case-insensitive partial match.
animalSpecies	string	"any"	One of any, dog, cat, horse, cattle, pig, other.
reactionTerm	string	""	VeDDRA reaction term such as vomiting or death.
dateFrom, dateTo	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	null	Report receive date window.

Example: 50 dog reactions to spinosad in 2024.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "productName": "spinosad",
    "animalSpecies": "dog",
    "dateFrom": "2024-01-01",
    "dateTo": "2024-12-31"
}

Example: every reported death in cattle.

{
    "maxItems": 200,
    "animalSpecies": "cattle",
    "reactionTerm": "death"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: adverse event reports are voluntary and unverified. Multiple reports for the same brand do not establish causation. Cross-check signals against the product label, sponsor's periodic safety update, and peer-reviewed literature before making clinical or regulatory decisions.

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📊 Output

Each report record contains 27 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 uniqueAerId	string	"USA-USFDACVM-2024-US-012345"
📄 reportId	string	"012345"
📅 originalReceiveDate	string	"2024-03-14"
📅 onsetDate	string | null	"2024-03-10"
⚠️ seriousAe	string	"Yes"
🏷️ typeOfInformation	string	"Adverse Event"
🌍 foreignOrDomestic	string	"Domestic"
🐾 animalSpecies	string	"Dog"
♂️♀️ animalGender	string | null	"Female"
🐩 animalBreed	string | null	"Labrador Retriever"
⏳ animalAgeYears	number | null	7
⚖️ animalWeightKg	number | null	32.5
💊 primaryProductBrand	string | null	"Comfortis"
🏭 primaryProductManufacturer	string | null	"Elanco"
🧪 primaryProductActiveIngredients	array	["spinosad"]
💉 primaryProductRoute	string | null	"Oral"
💊 primaryProductDosageForm	string | null	"Tablet"
🐕 numberOfAnimalsAffected	number | null	1
🐕 numberOfAnimalsTreated	number | null	1
🏥 treatedForAe	string | null	"Yes"
🤒 reactions	array	["Vomiting", "Lethargy"]
🩺 outcomes	array	["Recovered"]
👤 primaryReporter	string | null	"Veterinarian"
🏛️ receiverOrganization	string	"FDA-CVM"
💊 drugs	array	[{...}]
📦 fullRecord	object	{...}
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-22T00:00:00.000Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🐾	Full species coverage. Dogs, cats, horses, cattle, pigs, and the long tail of other species.
💊	Brand or active ingredient. Search the trade name or fall back to the chemical for richer recall.
🩺	VeDDRA reactions. International dictionary terms enable cross-study harmonization.
⚡	Fast. 10 reports in under 5 seconds, 10,000 records in roughly a minute.
🏛️	Official source. Reports filed directly with the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls the latest published quarter, so signals reflect current pharmacovigilance.
🚫	No authentication. Public data, no login or token required.

📊 Structured adverse event data is the foundation of every veterinary safety signal, product label change, and pet insurance underwriting model.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ openFDA Vet Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	1.3M+ reports	Live per run	product, species, reaction, date	⚡ 2 min
Manual FDA portal browsing	Free	Single-record only	Quarterly	UI filters	🐢 Hours
Commercial pharmacovigilance suites	$25,000+/year	Multi-source signal	Daily	Many	⏳ Weeks
Academic data dumps	Free	Snapshot, stale	Annual	None	🕒 Days

Pick this Actor when you want structured, filterable, current data with no contract.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the openFDA Animal & Veterinary Adverse Event Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a product or species, optionally add a reaction term and date range, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

💊 Veterinary Pharma Pharmacovigilance signal detection by ingredient Pre-launch competitor reaction profile review Label-change evidence gathering Periodic safety update report inputs	🐾 Pet Insurance Claims-risk modeling by breed and product Underwriting flags for high-risk medications Reserve-setting based on outcome distributions Loss-prevention education content
🩺 Clinical Research Breed-specific sensitivity meta-analyses Reaction-frequency baselines for trial design Real-world evidence for academic papers Comparative safety reviews	📰 Health Journalism Investigative reporting on recalls Brand-safety scorecards for consumer outlets Trend coverage by species or drug class Sourced data visualizations

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🔌 Automating openFDA Animal & Veterinary Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Hourly, daily, or weekly refreshes keep downstream databases in sync automatically.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Veterinary epidemiology coursework datasets Reproducible pharmacovigilance studies Comparative pharmacology theses Open-data exercises on regulatory transparency	🎨 Personal and creative Pet-owner safety blogs and newsletters Side projects for vet tech tooling Portfolio data-visualization demos Hobbyist breed-health research
🤝 Non-profit and civic Animal welfare advocacy reports Civic transparency on drug recalls Investigative journalism on product safety Open data contributions to vet community wikis	🧪 Experimentation Train safety-signal classification models Validate AI vet-triage product hypotheses Prototype regulatory-monitoring agents Test dashboard concepts with real reports

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Set your product, species, reaction, or date filters in the input form, click Start, and the Actor pulls reports from the openFDA Animal & Veterinary pharmacovigilance file. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How complete is the dataset?

The corpus holds over 1.3 million reports going back to the late 1980s. Modern coverage (2010 onward) is the most complete, since electronic reporting was standardized then.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

The FDA publishes new reports on a quarterly cadence. Every run of this Actor fetches the latest published quarter at request time.

🐎 Does it cover horses and food animals?

Yes. Set animalSpecies to horse, cattle, or pig, or pick other for exotics, poultry, and small ruminants.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval and keep a downstream safety-signal database in sync.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

The underlying reports are released by the FDA as public-domain U.S. government data. Review your own downstream use for HIPAA-equivalent veterinary privacy concerns where applicable.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Public U.S. government data may be redistributed and used commercially. You remain responsible for downstream regulatory compliance.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and unlocks scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails?

Apify retries transient errors automatically. You can inspect the log in the Runs tab, adjust the input, and re-run. Partial datasets are preserved.

📚 Why are some brand-name searches empty?

Reporters often record the active ingredient instead of the brand name. If a brand search comes back empty, retry with the ingredient (e.g. spinosad instead of Comfortis).

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Reach us via the Apify platform or the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

openFDA Animal & Veterinary Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe pharmacovigilance data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh adverse event signals into your safety dashboard, or alert your team in Slack.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the FDA, the Center for Veterinary Medicine, or any drug sponsor. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open government data is collected.