Damien Lopez, age 4, has symptoms that many people who live near Southern California’s Salton Sea also have. “His cough gets very wheezy. I try to control him,” his mother Michelle Lopez said. … A 2019 University of Southern California study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that between 20% and 22% of children in the region have asthma-like symptoms, a little more than triple the national rate for asthma, according to numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. David Lo, a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside, led a university study last year that determined the Salton Sea itself is responsible for the high incidence of asthma for those who live near it.