Researchers from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau attempting to log in to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, managed by the US National Cancer Institute, have been denied access since Friday.
They have instead been greeted with a terse notification that “access cannot be restored at this time”.
SEER covers 48 per cent of the US population and provides nationwide data on cancer incidence, survival rates and treatments to support research and epidemiological investigations. It was previously open to researchers across the globe.
However, access has been completely blocked to institutions in designated countries – which include Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as China – under a security update published last week by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US.
A researcher at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, who asked not to be identified, said the ban was “a very serious scientific event”.
“Many graduate students’ research topics rely on this data for preliminary exploration, and many projects require international data for validation. Therefore, the crucial piece of cancer data is missing, greatly diminishing its practicality.”
