Skip to main content

Spain (AEMPS) Collector

The Spain collector first asks the public AEMPS search service for pages that might be medicine recalls. These possible matches are called candidates. It then opens each candidate and rejects pages that are not relevant.

The search endpoint is:

https://www.aemps.gob.es/wp-json/aemps-search/v1/search

Finding Candidates​

The collector uses several Spanish search phrases, including Nº alerta, Retirada medicamento lote, and defecto calidad medicamento. Full builds add the year to these searches and move through every result page with page=N.

Search results can include unrelated material. The collector removes obvious veterinary, cosmetic, product-safety, and general news pages before and after reading the detail page.

An accepted human-medicine alert normally has an identifier such as:

R_21/2026

Veterinary identifiers such as VDC are rejected.

Reading a Notice​

AEMPS detail pages normally provide labeled fields such as:

  • Nº alerta
  • Fecha
  • Producto
  • Marca comercial y presentación
  • Lote
  • Laboratorio titular
  • Clasificación de los defectos
  • Descripción del defecto

HTML is the first choice because it is faster to download and easier to parse. If required fields are missing and AEMPS links a PDF, the collector can inspect that PDF with pdfplumber. The PDF is stored only in temporary space and is not committed to the repository.

Maintenance Risk​

AEMPS can change page templates, labels, and search behavior. When a real page introduces a new format, add a small fixture that reproduces it and update the adapter test before broadening the parser.