Check how the record was counted before citing it.

Counting rules

Events and products answer different questions.

Recalled product

One official FDA enforcement record. Product counts use this unit.

Recall event

Products grouped only when they share the same usable official event identifier. Missing, malformed, or ambiguous identifiers are never repaired by inference.

Timeline date

Products use their official recall-initiation date. Events use the earliest available initiation date among their products. Undated records remain visible outside chart buckets.

Interpretation rules

Formatting is not identity, and source text is not an estimate.

• Firm keys normalize case, whitespace, and punctuation only. They map to a first-class Firm record, but they do not merge corporate families or imply common ownership.
• Device root-cause evidence is sourced only through documented official identifiers; conflicting candidates remain ambiguous.
• Failure-mode version 1.0.0 assigns every available unmatched recall reason to Unknown; blank reasons receive no assignment. Counts are generated from these persisted outcomes, not copied into documentation.
• Distribution and quantity remain source wording. The app does not infer affected people, exposure, places, or risk.
• The corpus is for historical research, not medical advice, real-time alerts, company safety rankings, or FDA lifecycle tracking.