LOS ANGELES, Aug. 31 — Stonewalling by the Veterans Administration is putting U.S. cancer surveillance and research in jeopardy, according to many of the researchers involved in those fields.

The result, Dr. Deapen said, is that California state data on cancer incidence rates are being skewed. And that, he said, is likely to have serious effects on national data

“But it’s not just California — it’s nearly every state,” she said.

Missing data from those two states has the potential to warp national estimates, she said.

Lancet Oncology quoted Raye Ann Dorn, the VA’s national coordinator of cancer programs, as saying that only California and Florida were withholding data, mainly because of privacy concerns.

Dr. Howe said her organization and others have been trying to persuade the VA to resume wholehearted data-sharing, but with little success. “We’ve been trying to solve this for over five years,” she said.

Asked if she knows what’s behind the policy, Dr. Howe said flatly: “No.”

Representatives of a “whole cadre of associations” – including NAACCR, the CDC, the American Cancer Society, and the National Cancer Institute – met in early August to discuss the issue, Dr. Deapen said.

The skewing of national and state cancer incidence rates, he said, is “correctable.”

“The VA still has the data,” he said. “They could hand it out and then we could correct incidence rate data.”

What is “incorrectable,” he said, is the effect the data blockade could have on research.

Dr. Deapen said, for example, that researchers investigating the causes of a particular type of cancer might be misled if they were not aware of a cluster of cases being treated in VA hospitals.

“Once that study is done, (the researcher) doesn’t get to go back and do it over,” Dr. Deapen said. Research during this period “will forever require an asterisk” to remind other researchers that it might not be correct