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FDA Import Alert Monitor — DWPE Red List Scraper & Change Feed

Track FDA Import Alerts (Detention Without Physical Examination — DWPE) automatically. This Actor scrapes the official FDA Import Alert system and gives you a clean, structured feed of every firm, product, and country on the Red List, Green List, and Yellow List — plus a daily change delta of which firms were added, removed, or changed since your last run.

Built for customs brokers, import-compliance consultants, supplier due-diligence teams, and food / pharma / dietary-supplement / cosmetic importers who need to know — before a shipment is detained — whether a firm or product just landed on an FDA import alert.

Data source: the official FDA Import Alert system at accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia. FDA content is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). This Actor only collects publicly published regulatory data about companies and products — no consumer personal data. Fields the FDA redacts are left redacted.

What it does

• 🔴 Scrapes the Red / Green / Yellow lists of any (or every) FDA import alert.
• 🔁 Change-delta feed — get only what's new since last run: firms added to the Red List, removed from it, or whose entry changed. (The FDA itself sells a paid "Import Alert Weekly Summary" — this is that signal, automated and structured.)
• 🌍 Filter by country (e.g. only CHINA, INDIA) or by specific alert numbers.
• 📦 Clean structured output — firm name, address, country, FDA product code, product description, publish date, list type, and source URL.
• 🤖 Runs unattended on a schedule — point Apify Scheduler at it and receive a daily/weekly delta with zero manual work.

Use cases

Run modes

Set the mode input:

• delta (recommended for monitoring) — scrape, then output only firms added / removed / changed since the previous run. The first run quietly establishes a baseline; every run after that emits real changes.
• full — output every firm/product on the selected alerts (a complete current snapshot).
• discover — list all active import alerts (number, type, name, publish date, URL). Great for picking which alerts to monitor.

Input

Notifications (turn it into a monitoring service)

In delta mode, set notifyWebhookUrl and/or notifySlackWebhookUrl. Whenever a scheduled run detects firms added / removed / changed, the Actor pushes a summary to your endpoint — so you're alerted the moment a supplier lands on (or leaves) an FDA import alert, with no polling. Each change row also carries a severity (high = added to the Red List). Notifications are best-effort and never affect the dataset or the run.

Example input

{
"mode":"delta",
"countryFilter":["CHINA","INDIA"],
"listTypes":["red"],
"requestDelaySecs":30
}

Output

Each dataset item is one firm/product row:

{
"changeType":"added",
"alertNumber":"66-41",
"listType":"red",
"country":"INDIA",
"firmName":"Example Pharma Pvt Ltd",
"productDescription":"Isotretinoin (Keratolytic)",
"productCode":"64 X - - 11",
"desc":"Brand X",
"notes":"The product appears to be an unapproved new drug…",
"datePublished":"10/07/2020",
"address":"Plot 12, Industrial Area, Mumbai, Maharashtra INDIA",
"alertUrl":"https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_190.html",
"hasRedaction":false
}

• A firm with multiple products yields one row per product.
• In delta mode, changeType is added, removed, or changed. changed rows also carry previousProductDescription / previousDesc.
• In full mode, changeType is current.
• hasRedaction: true means the FDA hid one or more fields on that entry (we honor it).

Scheduling (the recommended setup)

1. Run once in discover mode to see all alerts.
2. Create a task in delta mode with your countryFilter / alertNumbers.
3. Add an Apify Schedule (e.g. daily at 06:00). The first run sets a baseline; from then on you get a tidy feed of only what changed — integrate it with a webhook, email, Slack, or your database.

Notes & limitations

• The FDA Import Alert pages are legacy HTML and update irregularly. The Actor includes parser-health checks and fails safe.
• DELTA integrity: if any targeted alert fails to fetch (network error or the FDA's HTTP-200 "apology" throttle page), the run does not emit deltas or overwrite its baseline — preventing false "removed" rows. It also refuses to persist a snapshot that shrank implausibly. So a partial/throttled run is a safe no-op, not corrupted data.
• The Actor fetches and honors the FDA robots.txt (Disallow rules + the 30-second hit-rate).
• This Actor reads only public FDA data about firms/products. It does not collect consumer personal data; fields the FDA redacts are left redacted.

Pricing

This Actor runs on pay-per-usage — you only pay Apify's standard platform usage for the compute and data transfer each run consumes. In delta mode each run is light (it fetches the alerts and emits only what changed), which keeps recurring monitoring inexpensive. You can start on the free tier with the monthly Apify credits.

Keywords: FDA import alert scraper, DWPE scraper, FDA Red List monitor, detention without physical examination, FDA import refusal data, customs broker compliance data, FDA import alert API, import alert change feed, FDA Green List, supplier due diligence FDA.