💊 OpenFDA Drug Adverse Events & Recall Scraper

🚀 Export FDA drug adverse events, drug labels, and food recalls in seconds. No API key, no auth, zero configuration required.

The OpenFDA Scraper collects structured data from the openFDA public API - the US Food and Drug Administration's official open data platform. No credentials or API keys needed. Data is sourced directly from FDA's FAERS (FDA Adverse Event Reporting System), DailyMed drug labels database, and the FDA enforcement database.

Supports three datasets: drug adverse events (~20 million reports), drug labels (structured prescribing information), and food enforcement recalls (Class I, II, and III). Every record is normalized and ready for download in CSV, JSON, or Excel.

Coverage: All adverse event reports submitted to FDA globally. Reporters from 100+ countries. Drug adverse events date back to the 1960s with the most active period from 2004 onwards. Food enforcement recalls cover ongoing and terminated actions.

Who uses this	Why
Pharmacovigilance teams	Monitor adverse drug reaction trends
Healthcare researchers	Study drug safety signals across demographics
Regulatory affairs analysts	Track FDA enforcement actions and recalls
Data scientists	Build ML models on drug-reaction relationships
Medical journalists	Investigate drug safety stories with data
Public health agencies	Monitor population-level drug event patterns

📋 What the OpenFDA Scraper does

• Fetches drug adverse event reports from FDA FAERS with full patient demographics and reaction terms
• Exports drug label data including active ingredients, warnings, and dosage instructions
• Retrieves food enforcement recalls with classification, firm details, and distribution patterns
• Supports free-text search queries using openFDA's Lucene-based search syntax
• Filters drug events by date range (start/end date)
• Paginates automatically through up to 25,000 results per query window
• Normalizes dates to ISO format, maps coded fields (sex, serious outcome) to human-readable values

💡 Why it matters: The FDA receives over 1 million adverse event reports per year. This actor gives researchers, analysts, and developers programmatic access to 20+ million historical reports without writing a single line of code.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: drugs, patientAge, patientSex, reactions, receiveDate, reportCountry, results, safetyReportId, scrapedAt, serious, seriousnessDeath. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account w/ $5 credit on Apify
2. Go to the OpenFDA Scraper page
3. Click Try for free
4. Set dataType to drug_events, drug_labels, or food_enforcement
5. Optionally add a search query and date range
6. Set maxItems to the number of records you need
7. Click Start and wait for the run to complete
8. Download your dataset in CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	Description
FDIC Bank Scraper	Export all FDIC-insured US banks with financial metrics
USPTO Office Actions Scraper	Fetch US patent office actions from USPTO
World Bank Scraper	Download World Bank development indicators

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more public-data scrapers across government, finance, jobs, and real estate.

This actor accesses only publicly available data from the openFDA API (open.fda.gov). All data is provided by the US Food and Drug Administration under their open data terms. ParseForge is not affiliated with the FDA. Use of this data is subject to openFDA's terms of service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.