Chemicals used in weed killer increase the danger of prostate cancer.
Weed killer chemicals can raise the risk of prostate cancer
Tests conducted on almost 300 pesticides alarmingly revealed that 22 had 'direct' links to the disease and four were shown to raise the prospect of death.
US experts believe that the findings show how significant the environment is as a risk factor for the illness - which kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide annually - but conceded that their paper was only observational and can't prove causality.
Lead author of the study Dr. Simon John Christoph Sorensen, a prostate cancer expert at Stanford University, argues that the research could "potentially explain" the "geographic variation" in incidence and deaths from the disease across the US.
He said: "By building on these findings, we can work towards reducing the number of men affected by this disease."