Disease Outbreak News Scraper

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Scrape the latest World Health Organization (WHO) Disease Outbreak News notices for public-health monitoring, travel-risk alerts, insurance workflows, NGO dashboards, OSINT pipelines, and epidemiology research.

The actor extracts structured WHO Disease Outbreak News (DON) records including publication date, title, country/region, disease or hazard, canonical URL, summary, risk assessment, WHO advice, and optional full article text.

What does Disease Outbreak News Scraper do?

Disease Outbreak News Scraper monitors the official WHO Disease Outbreak News source at who.int and turns public outbreak notices into clean dataset rows.

It can:

• 🦠 collect the latest WHO outbreak notices
• 🌍 infer countries and regions from WHO titles
• 📅 filter by publication date range
• 🔎 filter by disease or hazard keyword
• 📄 include full article text for NLP and search indexing
• 🧭 extract WHO advice and risk assessment sections when present
• 🔗 preserve canonical WHO source URLs for auditability

Who is it for?

This actor is designed for teams that need reliable outbreak signals from an authoritative source.

• 🏥 Public-health analysts tracking new WHO notices
• ✈️ Travel risk and duty-of-care teams monitoring destinations
• 🛡️ Security and OSINT teams building early warning feeds
• 🧬 Pharma, clinical operations, and supply-chain teams watching health events
• 🤝 NGOs and humanitarian teams monitoring operational risk
• 🧾 Insurers and assistance companies triaging health advisories
• 📊 Data teams feeding dashboards, alerts, or knowledge bases

Why use this actor?

WHO Disease Outbreak News pages are public, but analysts often need structured and scheduled data rather than manually checking a website.

This actor gives you:

• repeatable scheduled runs
• API-ready JSON output
• direct export to CSV, Excel, JSON, XML, RSS, or Parquet through Apify datasets
• stable dedupe keys via WHO URLs and DON identifiers
• optional article text for downstream classification

Data extracted

How much does it cost to scrape WHO disease outbreak news?

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing.

You pay a small run-start charge plus a per-record charge for each saved WHO outbreak notice. The input prefill is intentionally small so the first run is inexpensive. Increase maxItems for scheduled monitoring or historical backfills.

How to use Disease Outbreak News Scraper

1. Open the actor on Apify.
2. Set maxItems to the number of notices you need.
3. Optionally add fromDate and toDate.
4. Optionally add disease keywords such as cholera, mpox, yellow fever, Ebola, or Nipah.
5. Optionally add country/region keywords such as India, Uganda, Global, or Democratic Republic of the Congo.
6. Enable includeArticleText if you need full text.
7. Run the actor and export the dataset.

Input options

Maximum outbreak notices

maxItems controls how many WHO notices are saved. Use a low number for alerts and a higher number for historical collection.

From date and to date

Use fromDate and toDate in YYYY-MM-DD format to restrict notices by publication date.

Countries or regions

Use countries to match geography in WHO titles. Examples:

• Global
• India
• Uganda
• Democratic Republic of the Congo

Diseases or hazards

Use diseases to match disease or hazard keywords in WHO titles. Examples:

• yellow fever
• cholera
• Ebola
• mpox
• Nipah

Include full article text

Set includeArticleText to true when you need the full article for NLP, semantic search, compliance review, or data enrichment.

Output example

{
"title":"Yellow fever - Global",
"url":"https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2026-DON610",
"outbreakId":"2026-DON610",
"publishedDate":"2026-06-24T18:00:00Z",
"formattedDate":"24 June 2026",
"countries":["Global"],
"disease":"Yellow fever",
"summary":"Globally, in 2025 and early 2026...",
"riskAssessment":"...",
"whoAdvice":"...",
"source":"WHO Disease Outbreak News",
"scrapedAt":"2026-06-27T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Tips for best results

• Use scheduled runs for alert monitoring.
• Keep maxItems small for frequent monitoring.
• Enable full article text only when needed.
• Use disease filters for focused dashboards.
• Use date filters for incremental collection.
• Store the WHO URL or outbreakId as your dedupe key.

Integrations

Disease Outbreak News Scraper works well with:

• Slack or email alerts for new notices
• Google Sheets or Airtable outbreak trackers
• Snowflake, BigQuery, or S3 data lakes
• OSINT dashboards and security monitoring tools
• RAG pipelines and vector databases
• Travel-risk and duty-of-care workflows
• Insurance triage and claims risk workflows

API usage

Node.js

import{ ApifyClient }from'apify-client';
const client =newApifyClient({token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN});
const run =await client.actor('automation-lab/disease-outbreak-news-scraper').call({
maxItems:25,
diseases:['yellow fever'],
includeArticleText:false
});
console.log(run.defaultDatasetId);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('automation-lab/disease-outbreak-news-scraper').call(run_input={
'maxItems':25,
'countries':['Global'],
})
print(run['defaultDatasetId'])

cURL

curl"https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/automation-lab~disease-outbreak-news-scraper/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN"\
-H'Content-Type: application/json'\
-d'{"maxItems":25,"includeArticleText":false}'

MCP usage

Use this actor from Apify MCP tools in Claude Code or Claude Desktop.

MCP endpoint:

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=automation-lab/disease-outbreak-news-scraper

Claude Code setup:

$claude mcp add apify-who-outbreaks https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=automation-lab/disease-outbreak-news-scraper

Claude Desktop JSON config:

{
"mcpServers":{
"apify-who-outbreaks":{
"url":"https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=automation-lab/disease-outbreak-news-scraper"
}
}
}

Example prompts:

• "Run the WHO disease outbreak news scraper for the latest 20 notices and summarize new global risks."
• "Scrape WHO Disease Outbreak News for Ebola notices and return country, date, risk assessment, and advice."
• "Monitor WHO outbreak notices since last week and identify items relevant to travel security."

Scheduling and monitoring

For alert monitoring, create a scheduled Apify task with:

• maxItems: 10 to 25
• fromDate: recent date when appropriate
• disease or country filters for your workflow
• includeArticleText: false unless full text is required

Export or webhook the dataset into your alerting system.

Common workflows

Public-health dashboard

Run daily, collect the latest notices, dedupe by outbreakId, and chart counts by disease and region.

Travel-risk alerting

Run every few hours with destination country filters and send new rows to Slack or email.

Clinical operations monitoring

Track disease keywords that may affect trial sites, supply chains, or field operations.

OSINT enrichment

Send full article text into a classifier, vector database, or entity extraction pipeline.

FAQ

Can I schedule this WHO outbreak scraper?

Yes. Create an Apify task and schedule it hourly, daily, or weekly depending on your alerting needs.

Does this actor scrape private or restricted medical data?

No. It extracts public WHO Disease Outbreak News pages and preserves WHO source URLs for citation.

Troubleshooting

I got fewer results than maxItems

Filters may exclude many notices. Remove country, disease, or date filters and try again.

Country fields look inferred

WHO titles are not a formal country taxonomy. The actor infers countries and regions from title text and preserves the original title and URL for verification.

Risk assessment or WHO advice is empty

Not every WHO notice uses the same section headings. The actor fills these fields when matching sections are present on the detail page.

Data freshness

The actor reads the current WHO public endpoint and detail pages at run time. Use Apify schedules for continuous monitoring.

Legality and ethics

This actor collects public WHO web content. Always respect WHO terms, cite WHO as the source when redistributing analysis, and use the data responsibly for public-health, risk, research, and monitoring workflows.

Related scrapers

Explore related Automation Lab actors at:

• https://apify.com/automation-lab
• https://apify.com/automation-lab/google-news-scraper
• https://apify.com/automation-lab/website-contact-finder

Limitations

• Countries and diseases are inferred from title text.
• Historical archive pages outside the current WHO endpoint are not separately crawled in this version.
• The actor does not provide medical advice; it structures source material for monitoring and analysis.

Changelog

Initial version extracts WHO Disease Outbreak News records with filters, summaries, risk/advice sections, and optional full text.

Support

If you need additional WHO fields, historical archive coverage, or a specific alert workflow, open an issue on Apify and include your input JSON and expected output.