Global patterns of chemical incident reporting from open-source intelligence, 2023–2024

New chemicals are continually developed, transported, and used worldwide, increasing the risk of incidents affecting human, animal, and environmental health. Despite this, global surveillance of chemical incidents remains limited. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) provides an event-based surveillance approach to identify hazards, health outcomes, reporting patterns, and geospatial trends to support public health preparedness and response. The terms chemical, incident, accident, and spill were translated into 32 languages and entered into Google Alerts to capture daily reports from 1 September 2023 to 1 March 2024. Alerts were translated using Google Translate; data were extracted into Microsoft Excel, analysed in STATA/BE 18.0, and mapped using ArcGIS Pro. A total of 128 chemical incidents were identified, most frequently reported in the United States (44.5%), India (16.4%), and Australia (11.7%). Common locations included roads (24.2%) and chemical plants (19.5%). Most incidents were accidental (93.8%) and involved unknown chemicals (53.1%), resulting in 567 non-hospitalised injuries, 273 hospitalisations, and 84 fatalities. OSINT offers a real-time approach for chemical incident signal detection and situational awareness, enhancing early warning and informing public health responses, rather than population-level burden estimation, particularly in settings where formal chemical incident surveillance systems are limited or absent.