CancerDisinfo’s new open-data tool makes 265,000 written parliamentary questions searchable, beginning with what Türkiye’s record reveals about cancer and accountability.
Since 2002, Türkiye’s members of parliament have filed close to 265,000 written questions to ministers. It is a public record of what the country’s elected representatives wanted answered, and what the government chose to put on the record in reply. Nearly 3,000 of them concern cancer. They ask about polluted neighborhoods, occupational exposure in factories, unsafe workplaces, screening gaps in rural provinces, access to medicine, HPV vaccines, and the spread of unregulated electronic cigarettes. Many received no public answer.
With support from the Metamorphosis Foundation under the Digital Spark / Strategic Growth Small Grants program, CancerDisinfo is building the Parliamentary Cancer Accountability Tracker (PCAT): an open-data tool that turns this scattered record into searchable public evidence.
Why CancerDisinfo looked to parliament
CancerDisinfo is an independent media and public-interest initiative based in Türkiye. We work on the information environment around cancer: misleading treatments, distorted scientific claims, fear-based narratives, and the conditions that make people vulnerable to misinformation.
We began from a simple observation. Cancer disinformation does not grow only because false claims circulate online. It also grows where trustworthy public information is missing, delayed, fragmented, or impossible to verify. When patients cannot find reliable answers about screening, treatment access, environmental exposure, or vaccine safety, the information vacuum is quickly filled by rumor, commercial exploitation, and pseudoscience.
This is why parliament matters to us. Written parliamentary questions are one of the few formal tools elected representatives can use to ask ministers to put answers on the public record. They show what communities asked their deputies to raise, what deputies brought to the state, and what the executive chose to answer or leave unanswered.
A long tradition, a thin public record
Türkiye has a long parliamentary tradition of written questions. Our corpus covers seven parliamentary terms, beginning with the 22nd Parliament in 2002.
The records since the 20th term, starting in 1996, exist on the parliament’s website, but only in a narrow technical sense. There is no full-text search, no thematic classification, and no machine-readable export. Nearly a quarter of a million documents sit on a public server with no practical public way to interrogate them systematically. For journalists and civil-society organizations, the archive functions less like a public record and more like an obstacle. PCAT was created to lower that obstacle.
Why cancer?
Cancer is a deliberate entry point. It sits at the intersection of environmental policy, occupational health, access to medicines, regional inequality, health literacy, and a vast informal economy of pseudo-cures. It is also a subject on which silence is meaningful. When a ministry does not respond to a question about a delayed screening program, an alleged misdiagnosis, or possible industrial exposure, the absence of a public record shapes how citizens understand risk and responsibility.
The cancer corpus is large enough to be analytically interesting and small enough to be tractable. Cancer is the proof of concept; the infrastructure opens the door to other accountability themes.
What PCAT does and who can benefit from it?
The Parliamentary Cancer Accountability Tracker has indexed almost 265,000 written questions filed since 2002 and identified nearly 3,000 cancer-related questions.
The data moves through six stages. First, a scraper collects every written question filed since 2002 from the parliament’s website, along with the associated answer PDFs where they exist. Second, optical character recognition (OCR) converts the scanned PDFs into machine-readable text. Third, each question is linked to the deputy who filed it with party affiliation, province, and parliamentary term, and to the ministry and individual official it was addressed to. Fourth, a transparent rule-based classifier flags cancer-related questions. Fifth, a public search interface makes the entire archive queryable. Sixth, an editorial layer, including monthly written summaries and various visualizations, turns raw counts into a legible narrative.
The tool is designed for local journalists, civil society organizations working on patient rights, environmental justice, and occupational safety, and the patient and caregiver community itself, which is disproportionately shaped by women’s unpaid care work.
What the cancer record already shows
The most striking pattern is continuity. The same themes return year after year: pollution near industrial sites, occupational exposure in shipyards and mines, asbestos in older buildings, gaps in national screening programs for breast and cervical cancer, the safety and availability of cancer medicines, alleged misdiagnoses in public hospitals, and, more recently, electronic cigarettes and HPV vaccination.
Some clusters spike around specific moments: questions about a cement plant after a local cancer cluster is reported in the press, or a flurry around HPV vaccination when the issue enters opposition policy debates. Other questions, such as access to clean drinking water or oncology care in eastern and south-eastern provinces, recur regularly with little visible response from the executive.
For us, the most successful part of the project so far is that scattered documents are becoming a shared civic resource. A local journalist can follow a province over time. A patient organization can see whether access to medicine has been raised before. An environmental group can connect a factory, a district, and repeated parliamentary questions. This is where data becomes accountability infrastructure.
What comes next
User-testing sessions and a public launch workshop are scheduled for July and August 2026, alongside a short Turkish-language analytical report. These sessions will bring journalists, civil society organizations, and health advocates together to test the interface and imagine how the archive can support investigations, advocacy, and public communication.
PCAT will remain a permanent CancerDisinfo resource. The real outcomes will emerge when people use it: when a reporter follows an unanswered question; when an NGO compares parliamentary concern with policy gaps; when a patient advocate asks why the same issue has been raised for years without a clear public answer.
The same pipeline can be adapted to any accountability theme within the parliamentary record. With adjusted keyword dictionaries and tag sets, the same system can be adapted to femicide, child labor, workplace fatalities, environmental destruction, refugee rights, press freedom, and education policy. Cancer is the first lens. The infrastructure is general.
The hardest lesson is structural. A long parliamentary tradition produced a paper trail. Two decades of digitization produced a website. Neither produced accountability. That requires infrastructure: machine-readable data, search, interpretation, and a community willing to use the record as evidence. The Digital Spark grant helps us build the infrastructure. The longer work is building the community around it.
Author: Mert Can Yılmaz, Data Scientist & Gülin Çavuş, Founder, CancerDisinfo
