FDA Inspection Data 2008-2016 #Resist

This is part of my #1YearOfViz series! Check out the archive here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/p/one-year-of-dataviz.html

This is all of us in the data science community when we
heard whole datasets were just "disappearing" off .gov sites!

Given the recent trend of disabling publicly available data sources thanks to the President of the USA those of us in the public data science community have been frantically downloading all we can from .gov websites.

I'd heard that FDA was getting gutted so I wanted to look at inspection dates/locations. This viz isn't particularly fancy and I'm going to get to some more fun topics next week but I wanted to get this one out the door while I get my scrapper to stop crashing!

#dreamjob

Unfortunately they don't have the details of the inspections themselves or the results from them in this data. Still there are certain types of FDA inspections that are caused by complaints or warnings which can be figured out pretty quickly/easily.

For instance you can look at "Foodborne Biological Hazards" as these usually stem from complaints of food poisoning by multiple sources (as well as regular inspections). The trick then is to look for places that had multiple inspections on a particular year. I sized the bubbles by number of inspections in a particular year so you can quickly find groups that have had numerous inspections in a given year. When I actually got into the data you can see how much the FDA is responsible for, from checking laboratories, food creation locations, and even medical product testing (think artificial hearts etc). It's neat to see how many of these types of inspections happen each year.

Let's get into the data. There isn't a ton to this dashboard and all interactions are done with the filters on the right-side of the dashboard. I tried to include "City" in the data listed on the map unfortunately "City" is a field that caused a LOT of problems so I decided to just leave it out and kept in zip code.

As usual if you have any questions leave a comment below or hit me up on twitter @wjking0! Remember not to let data disappear! We need to be the digital monks of these digital dark ages and archive things in as many places as possible! #RESIST gang!

Me as a food inspector