Wakko started a Python API for Zabbix. I recently added a bit too it. If I get time I'm going to rewrite a bunch of it so it's not such a PITA to work on.
I've created a script that will pull down the Apache status page, parse it, and then send the data to Zabbix. It's a lot faster than other methods that work with Zabbix because it only does one get of the status page and uses a single zabbix_sender command to send it back.