Monthly Viral Hepatitis Surveillance Data by Region — Bulgaria

This dataset contains monthly counts of newly registered viral hepatitis cases by type and by administrative oblast in Bulgaria, covering January 2022 through February 2026 (50 months, 9,800 records). Data were extracted programmatically from PDF reports published by the National Centre for Public Health and Analysis (НЦОЗА/NCPHA). Source National Centre for Public Health and Analysis (NCPHA), Ministry of Health, Bulgaria. Series: Месечна информация за регистрирани заболявания от вирусен хепатит по области URL: https://ncpha.government.bg/index/162-virusen-hepatit.html Files File Description hepatitis_bulgaria_long.csv Main dataset in long format (UTF-8 with BOM) metadata_variables.csv Variable-level metadata extract_ncpha_hepatitis.py Reproducible extraction script (Python 3.9+) .zenodo.json Zenodo deposit metadata README.md This file Dataset structure The main CSV file (hepatitis_bulgaria_long.csv) contains one row per year–month–diagnosis–oblast combination. Variable Type Description year integer Calendar year (2022–2026) month integer Calendar month (1–12) diagnosis_key character Short diagnosis code: A, B, C, D, E, unspecified, total diagnosis_en character Diagnosis label in English diagnosis_bg character Diagnosis label in Bulgarian oblast_code integer Oblast numeric code (1–28), following the standard NCPHA ordering oblast_en character Oblast name, English transliteration oblast_bg character Oblast name, Bulgarian Cyrillic cases integer Number of newly registered cases in the given month and oblast total_bulgaria integer National total for the given month and diagnosis, as published by NCPHA Diagnosis categories Key English ICD-10 A Viral hepatitis A, acute B15 B Viral hepatitis B (acute and chronic reported together in source) B16–B18.1 C Viral hepatitis C B17.1, B18.2 D Viral hepatitis D, acute B17.0 E Viral hepatitis E, acute B17.2 unspecified Viral hepatitis, unspecified type, acute B19 total All viral hepatitis combined — Oblast codes Code English Bulgarian 1 Blagoevgrad Благоевград 2 Burgas Бургас 3 Varna Варна 4 Veliko Tarnovo Велико Търново 5 Vidin Видин 6 Vratsa Враца 7 Gabrovo Габрово 8 Dobrich Добрич 9 Kardzhali Кърджали 10 Kyustendil Кюстендил 11 Lovech Ловеч 12 Montana Монтана 13 Pazardzhik Пазарджик 14 Pernik Перник 15 Pleven Плевен 16 Plovdiv Пловдив 17 Razgrad Разград 18 Ruse Русе 19 Silistra Силистра 20 Sliven Сливен 21 Smolyan Смолян 22 Sofia-city София-град 23 Sofia-region София-област 24 Stara Zagora Стара Загора 25 Targovishte Търговище 26 Haskovo Хасково 27 Shumen Шумен 28 Yambol Ямбол Validation For every month–diagnosis combination, the sum of oblast-level cases was verified against the published national total (total_bulgaria). All sums matched without exception. Extraction methodology The source PDFs use two distinct table layouts: 2022–2024 (Format A): A single table spanning the full page, with oblasts 1–15 in the upper half and oblasts 16–28 plus the national total in the lower half. 2025–2026 (Format B): Two separate tables — the first for oblasts 1–15, the second for oblasts 16–28 and the national total. Additionally, filename conventions vary across years: English month names for 2022–2024 (with Bulgarian transliterations for August and September 2022), and numeric month identifiers for 2025 onward. January and February 2023 are stored without a year subfolder in the source URL structure. The extraction script (extract_ncpha_hepatitis.py) handles all these variations automatically. It caches downloaded PDFs in a local pdfs/ directory, so re-running the script after new monthly reports are published will only fetch newly available files. Reproducibility # Requirements pip install pdfplumber pandas requests # Run extraction python extract_ncpha_hepatitis.py Updating To incorporate newly published months, re-run extract_ncpha_hepatitis.py. The script probes months through 2027 and silently skips URLs that return 404. Already-downloaded PDFs are not re-fetched. License This dataset is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).