Structured data on medicine and medical device recalls and rapid alerts issued by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB) of Kenya.
# PPB Kenya Recalls Dataset
Structured data on medicine and medical device recalls and rapid alerts issued by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB) of Kenya, covering 2016 to 2025.
## Source
All records originate from the PPB website (pharmacyboardkenya.org). Rapid alerts include both PPB-issued notices and WHO alerts circulated by PPB. The data was compiled and structured from publicly available recall notices and PDF documents.
## Files
### Structured data
| File | Description |
|------|-------------|
| `recalls_combined.csv` | All recall records from 2016 to 2025, stacked from two source files |
| `rapid_alerts.csv` | Rapid alerts and public notices from 2018 to 2025 |
| `manifest_recalls.csv` | Maps each recall PDF to its corresponding record in `recalls_combined.csv` |
| `manifest_rapid_alerts.csv` | Maps each rapid alert PDF to its corresponding record in `rapid_alerts.csv` |
| `curation_log.csv` | Documents manual data corrections and records flagged for review |
### Full-text corpus
| File | Description |
|------|-------------|
| `recalls_full_text.jsonl` | Extracted text from recall PDFs, one record per line |
| `rapid_alerts_full_text.jsonl` | Extracted text from rapid alert PDFs, one record per line |
Text was extracted using pdfplumber. Scanned PDFs were processed with Tesseract OCR at 300 DPI. Each record includes a `status` field: `ok` (digital text), `ocr_ok` (OCR), or `ocr_empty` (extraction failed).
### Source PDFs
| Folder | Description |
|--------|-------------|
| `recall_pdfs/` | Official recall notice PDFs from PPB |
| `rapid_alerts_pdfs/` | Rapid alert and public notice PDFs |
PDF filenames follow the pattern `{year}_{seq}.{product_name}.pdf` where `seq` reflects the numbering used on the PPB website at time of download, which does not always correspond to the official `recall_ref`.
## Coverage
- **Recalls**: 183 records, 2016–2025. Records before 2022 do not have an official `recall_ref` in the source data.
- **Rapid alerts**: 62 …