The city of Kinshasa is a megalopolis of more than 12 million inhabitants that has not adapted to the population explosion of the last 30 years. One of the serious consequences is the absence of binding urban planning standards in terms of construction and land use, with the result that many households are settling under the Very High Voltage (VHV) power lines that supply the city, in defiance of the 25m corridor recommended by the Electricity National Company (S.N.EL). Research undertaken since 2015 has established on the one hand a 100 m right-of-way on both sides of the line and revealed on the other hand that more cases of epilepsy, cancers, rheumatism and impaired eyesight are found in households living closest to these lines compared to national statistics, mainly in places where the magnetic fields are higher than 0.400 μT.
The world is becoming increasingly industrialized, technological revolution and innovation are proceeding at prodigious speeds, so that the number and diversity of electromagnetic (EMF) sources have increased significantly. Electricity has made our lives richer, safer and easier, but the transmission lines that carry it pose some health risks to the people who live around it due to the EMF they generate. Research was undertaken in 2015 to obtain information on the people living near these lines in the residential area of Kinshasa city. To this end, Magnetic Field (MF) measurements carried out there in 2015 and repeated in 2020 indicate that the average MF has increased over 5 years, notably in the axis of the line, notably from (0. 673 ±0.030) μT to (1.321 ±0.115) μT at Limete, (0.753 ±0.052) μT to (1.091 ±0.073) μT at Selembao and (1.017 ±0.095) μT to (1.342 ±0.102) μT at Bandalungwa. All these averages found in 2020 are increasingly above the threshold value of 0.400 μT.
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