How RxMonitor matches recalls

Health Canada publishes its recalls and safety alerts as open data. That file carries no DIN and no manufacturer name — its “organization” field names the Health Canada branch that issued the notice, not the company that made the product. There is nothing to join on.

So RxMonitor matches notices to medications on their wording, and that works less often than you would hope. This page says how often, because a matching rate you cannot see is one you cannot judge.

The numbers, as of 12 August 2026

• 2,306 notices in the feed concern human drugs, biologics, vaccines or radiopharmaceuticals.
• 869 of those (38%) were matched to at least one authorised product.
• 1,437 could not be matched to any product at all.
• 113 of the matches name a product name that more than one company sells, so they are shown as possible matches and never as recalls of a particular company’s product.
• 1,381 of the 11,417 medications on this site carry at least one matched notice. The other 10,036 carry none.

What an empty panel means, and what it does not

An empty recalls panel is not a statement that a medication has never been recalled. It means no notice in Health Canada’s feed matched this product’s name by the rules below. Given that 62% of drug notices match nothing at all, that is a real possibility for any product on this site.

This is why every drug page links Health Canada’s own recalls search rather than letting a blank panel speak. If you need to know whether a medication has been recalled, check with Health Canada — and talk to a pharmacist.

How the matching works

Two fields are searched: the notice’s product field, and the part of its title that comes before the first colon or semicolon. Health Canada writes titles as product name; what went wrong, so that leading fragment is usually the product. Nothing after it is searched.

A notice matches when that text begins with a product name we hold:

• An exact match — the whole text is a product name.
• A prefix match — the text starts with a product name, at a word boundary, and continues with a strength or a dosage form.

Where a notice names a product sold by only one company, the match is shown plainly. Where several companies sell a medication under the same name — nineteen products are simply called Pregabalin — the notice is shown as a possible match on all of them, saying so, because Health Canada’s data does not record whose was affected.

What we deliberately do not do

Each of these was tried, measured against the real feed, and dropped because it put recall notices on medications that had not been recalled. A false match is a published claim about a named manufacturer’s product, so the matching is tuned to miss rather than to over-reach.

• We do not search inside a notice. Thyroid is a real product name; it also appears in “affected lots may have decreased thyroid uptake”, which is about a diagnostic capsule. Searching inside also attached a notice about an unauthorized product containing undeclared sildenafil to the twelve authorised medications named Sildenafil, none of which was involved.
• We do not match on active ingredient. That fails the same way but wider — the same notice would reach all forty-seven medications containing sildenafil.
• We do not match product names shorter than five characters. Several are ordinary English words, and matching them produced far more errors than finds.

Some notices can never be matched, by anyone. Advisories about unauthorized products have no drug identification number by definition, and notices covering a category of products do not resolve to a single one. Those stay unmatched rather than being forced onto a product page.

Archived notices

Health Canada archives older notices. Where one names a product, we show it separately and label it as history — matched notices on this site run back to 2004, and an archived advisory is a record of what happened rather than a current warning.

More about the data on this site →

Source: Health Canada — Recalls and Safety Alerts. Data current as of 2026-08-12. Matched on product name, not on DIN — the feed carries none. Newest matched notice: 7 August 2026.