Bag Health MCP Server

bag-health-mcp

Part of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio — connecting AI models to Swiss public data sources.

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version

MCP server for Swiss public health data. Its core is the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (BAG) Infectious Disease Dashboard (IDD) — epidemiological surveillance for 51 pathogens (influenza, COVID-19, measles, wastewater surveillance, and more) — extended with a multi-source health-indicator layer over the Swiss Health Observatory (Obsan), the Versorgungsatlas (health-care supply atlas, with cantonal series) and Sucht Schweiz (HBSC youth survey). All read-only, public Open Government Data.

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What You Can Do

"Wie ist die aktuelle Grippesituation im Kanton Zürich verglichen mit den letzten Wochen?"
→ bag_health_mcp__get_canton_situation(canton="ZH")

"Gibt es aktuell einen Masernausbruch in der Schweiz?"
→ bag_health_mcp__get_disease_data(series_id="measles/cases/incValue/year", canton="all")

"Wie entwickelt sich das SARS-CoV-2-Signal im Abwasser?"
→ bag_health_mcp__list_series(topic="wastewater_viral_load")
→ bag_health_mcp__get_disease_data(series_id="wastewater_viral_load/NA/value/date", ...)

"Welche Krankheitsdaten stellt das BAG aktuell bereit?"
→ bag_health_mcp__list_diseases()

"Wie hat sich der Alkoholkonsum bei 15-Jährigen seit 2010 entwickelt?"   # 🎯 anchor query
→ bag_health_mcp__search_health_indicators(source="suchtschweiz", topic="alkohol")
→ bag_health_mcp__get_indicator_series(source="suchtschweiz",
      indicator_id="monam/alkoholkonsum-alter-11-15", region="ZH", year_from=2010)
→ More use cases by audience →

🎯 Anchor demo query — «Wie hat sich der Alkoholkonsum bei 15-Jährigen im Kanton Zürich seit 2010 entwickelt, und wie steht der Kanton im Schweizer Vergleich da?» The HBSC youth series (via Obsan) answers the Switzerland-wide trend since 2010 with 95% confidence intervals. This particular indicator is national only, so the response includes a region_note saying so (HBSC is not cantonally representative). Most other Obsan indicators are published by canton — see the note on cuts below. These are aggregated population statistics — not individual advice. See docs/tool-design-health-indicators.md.

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Tools

Infectious-disease surveillance (BAG IDD):

Health indicators — Obsan, Versorgungsatlas & Sucht Schweiz (multi-source):

⚠️ Aggregated population statistics only. The indicator tools serve population-level aggregates (prevalences/metrics by age/sex/region) — not individual advice, diagnosis or case assessment, and no personal data. This is stated in both tool descriptions and every response (aggregate_statistics_notice), and matters especially for suchtschweiz (HBSC), which touches prevention topics in a school context. Sources: Obsan ind.obsan.admin.ch (clean JSON API); Sucht Schweiz HBSC via the Obsan mirror (national); Versorgungsatlas returns a cantonal year/value series (26 cantons + a CH national total, with 95% CIs and a canton-vs-CH ratio) from the Tarifpool. See the per-source probe notes.

Obsan publishes an indicator in several cuts, not one series. Measured over 60 catalogue entries on 2026-08-08: 50 have a cantonal cut (kg), 49 one by age class (ag), 24 one by social position (sd) — and only 3 the plain national one (g). They are different measurements with different units, so get_indicator_series names the cut it returned in variant and lists the rest in variants_available, rather than presenting one as a stand-in for another. Eight of the 60 publish no series at all; that case fails with its reason instead of returning an empty result. The census is recorded and dated in tests/fixtures/obsan_variant_census.json.

Tool annotations

All tools carry MCP tool annotations so a host can reason about them without calling. Every tool is identical here — it only ever reads from the public, allow-listed data sources (BAG IDD, Obsan, Versorgungsatlas):

A host may therefore treat all calls as safe, cacheable reads. The values are declared once as READ_ONLY in server.py and applied to all 10 tools.

MCP Primitives

This server uses all three MCP primitives, each for what it is best at:

Tools (10) — live, parameterised actions that call the IDD API (above).

Resources — static, read-only reference data a host can fetch and cache, no arguments or upstream call needed:

Prompts — reusable, parameterised workflows a host can surface (e.g. as slash-commands):

Live surveillance data stays behind Tools (it is parameterised and changes weekly); fixed reference data is exposed as Resources; recommended multi-tool workflows are packaged as Prompts.

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Relevance for Schools & City Administration

Schulamt / Kreisschulbehörden:

• Monitor influenza and ARI incidence in your canton
• Single measles case → alert for schools with low vaccination coverage
• Pertussis tracking → protect unvaccinated infants (siblings of school children)

Stadtverwaltung / KI-Fachgruppe:

• Public Health Reporting with structured weekly data
• Wastewater surveillance as 1-week lead indicator before clinical cases

Synergy with portfolio:

• bag-epl-mcp → "What treatments are listed?" (EPL medication database)
• bag-health-mcp → "What is currently spreading?" (surveillance data)

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Data Source

• IDD API: https://api.idd.bag.admin.ch — No authentication required
• Update cycle: Every Wednesday
• Coverage: Switzerland + Liechtenstein (FL), 26 cantons
• Topics: 51 pathogens, 1386 data series

Datenquellen & Lizenzen / Data sources & licences

Required citation: Federal Office of Public Health FOPH — Infectious Disease Dashboard (IDD), open data via opendata.swiss. For the indicator tools, each response's provenance.source names the concrete upstream (e.g. «Sucht Schweiz — HBSC» via Obsan). Every tool response carries attribution in a provenance block (attribution + license fields) so downstream consumers can surface it automatically.

Architecture:
                    ┌─────────────────┐    api.idd.bag.admin.ch (IDD API, no auth)
  MCP Host          │  bag-health-mcp │──▶ ind.obsan.admin.ch   (Obsan JSON API)
  (Claude, etc.) ──▶│  MCP SDK        │──▶ versorgungsatlas.ch  (indicator catalogue)
                    │  10 Tools       │    all HTTPS, egress allow-listed, no auth
                    └─────────────────┘

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Installation

Claude Desktop (stdio)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bag-health": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["bag-health-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cloud / HTTP

pip install bag-health-mcp
python -m bag_health_mcp.server --http --port 8000

Transport, host and port are set via environment variables — MCP_TRANSPORT (http/stdio), MCP_HOST, MCP_PORT — which is the recommended way for deployments (the --http flag still works for local use). The server binds to 127.0.0.1 by default so a local HTTP server is not exposed to the network. Container/cloud deployments bind all interfaces by setting MCP_HOST=0.0.0.0 explicitly — the provided Dockerfile does this.

⚠️ Security: HTTP transport exposes the server on the network. Only bind beyond 127.0.0.1 in a network-isolated environment — never directly on a public/shared network. Binding to a non-localhost host logs a warning at startup. The default stdio transport has no network surface. See docs/security-posture.md.

HTTP auth (optional): set MCP_AUTH_TOKEN to require Authorization: Bearer <token> on every HTTP request (401 otherwise). Unset = no auth (fine for stdio/local). This gates who may invoke the server; for real user identity, front it with a gateway.

CORS (browser clients): set MCP_CORS_ORIGINS to a comma-separated origin allow-list to enable cross-origin browser access; the Mcp-Session-Id header is exposed so stateful sessions work. Empty = no cross-origin (never a wildcard).

Host allow-list (DNS rebinding): set MCP_ALLOWED_HOSTS to a comma-separated list of the names this server is reachable under, including the port, e.g. bag.example.ch:8000. Requests arriving under any other Host are rejected with 421; loopback stays allowed so container health checks keep working.

Unset on a non-localhost bind, the check is left off and a warning is logged — that is the gateway-fronted deployment, where the gateway validates Host. It is not guessed: on 0.0.0.0 the reachable name is unknowable here, and a wrong guess would reject the very deployment it is meant to protect.

This is independent of MCP_AUTH_TOKEN. The token says who is asking; this says under which name the server is addressed. A rebinding attack runs in a browser that already holds the token.

For running at scale (session affinity, resource limits, MCP gateway), see the deployment & scaling guide and the reference manifests in deploy/.

Logging: the server emits structured JSON logs (one object per line, with an RFC 5424 severity) to stderr — stdout is reserved for the stdio JSON-RPC transport. Set the level with MCP_LOG_LEVEL (default INFO).

Tracing (optional): install the telemetry extra and point the server at an OTLP collector to get OpenTelemetry spans per tool-call plus instrumented outbound HTTP:

pip install "bag-health-mcp[telemetry]"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://otel-collector:4318"
# optional: OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=bag-health-mcp

Tracing is a no-op unless both the extra is installed and an OTEL_* endpoint is set. Spans carry only the tool name and (on error) the exception class — never tool arguments, cantons or surveillance data.

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Available Disease Topics

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Demo

Claude asking about the influenza situation in canton Zurich — single tool call, structured result, actionable German-language summary.

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MCP Protocol Version

This server speaks two protocol eras over the same endpoint. The client's first request on a connection decides which one applies; a later claim from the other era is refused.

Both revisions are pinned in tests/test_protocol_version.py and asserted against the installed SDK, so a Dependabot bump of mcp cannot move either one silently. The handshake ceiling is measured against a live initialize through the assembled ASGI stack, not read off a constant name.

Note that the SDK's LATEST_PROTOCOL_VERSION is an alias for the modern era, not for the handshake era — pinning against it alone would leave the era that current clients actually negotiate free to drift.

Update policy. When the gate fails, do not edit the constant blindly: read the spec changelog between the two revisions, verify the server still behaves, then move the constant, this section, README.de.md and CHANGELOG.md together.

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Safety & Limits

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Known Limitations

• Beta API: IDD API is labelled v0.1 beta — schema may change without notice
• Weekly cadence: Data is not real-time; updated Wednesdays only
• Canton granularity: Some rare diseases have insufficient cases for canton-level data (suppressed for privacy)
• Age groups: Available dimensions vary by disease series; use bag_health_mcp__get_series_details to check

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Compliance

• ISDS (Stadt Zürich): a draft information-security protection-needs classification (Schutzbedarfsanalyse per Grundwert + measures mapping) is in docs/isds-klassifikation.md. It is a technically-grounded draft pending ISBO/OIZ sign-off — not a binding classification.
• Data classification (Schulamt): the data is classified ÖFFENTLICH / BUI (public OGD, no personal data, aggregated at canton level with small cells suppressed at source). Draft scheme + aggregation-risk note in docs/datenklassifikation-schulamt.md; the aggregating bag_health_mcp__get_canton_situation tool surfaces this in its response.
• Security posture: lethal-trifecta assessment (the server is strictly read-only → not affected), secret-management decision (no secrets — public data), and network-exposure notes are in docs/security-posture.md.
• Phase architecture: this is a Phase 1 (read-only) server; write/send capabilities are deferred behind documented prerequisites. See docs/roadmap.md.
• Reporting vulnerabilities: see the security policy for how to report security issues privately.

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md (Deutsch).

Security

See SECURITY.md (Deutsch) for the security posture and how to report a vulnerability confidentially.

License

Code: MIT (see LICENSE).

Data: BAG IDD is Open Government Data on opendata.swiss under free use with mandatory source attribution (Swiss OGD terms, CC BY-equivalent) — not public domain. Cite the Federal Office of Public Health FOPH (IDD) when reusing the data; see Data sources & licences.

Author

Hayal Oezkan · github.com/malkreide

Related Portfolio Servers

• swiss-statistics-mcp — BFS demographic data
• bag-epl-mcp — BAG medication reimbursement list
• zurich-opendata-mcp — City of Zurich open data

Installation

Run via uv's uvx — no clone or manual install needed. Add to your MCP client config (mcpServers for Claude Desktop, Cursor and Windsurf; use a top-level servers key for VS Code in .vscode/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bag-health-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "bag-health-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}