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However, chlordecone was legally marketed in France from 1981 until the government banned it in 1990, and its use continued for three more years after that in Guadeloupe and Martinique to kill the banana weevil under an exemption granted by the French government.

Among a variety of ailments, chlordecone is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, and these islanders suffer prostate cancer at among the highest rates in the world, French cancer researchers say.

Other French research links chlordecone exposure to preterm births.

But they also asserted that even in the 1990s, scientists had not established links between chlordecone and illnesses in people.

Chlordecone, also known as kepone, was patented in the 1950s by scientists working for Allied Chemical, a U.S. company based in New Jersey now called Allied Corporation, and millions of pounds of the pesticide were produced, nearly all of it exported for use outside the United States.