ON THE PULSE OF A PEOPLE: DR. ELMER HUERTA PREACHES WHAT HE PRACTICES, DISPENSING ON-AIR HEALTH ADVI

Excluding former surgeons general and sexologists, there are few public health celebrities -- the sort of people you'd collar on the street and tell them you brushed the way far back molars that morning while walking briskly, doing jumping jacks and not smoking. Narrow it to Latino public health celebrities and you can discard the plural. Hence the difficulty -- and the importance -- of being Elmer Huerta.

"Yesterday, I was in Virginia at dinner, with other scientists," Huerta says, dissecting the life of a public health proselytizer. "And one of the waiters, he said, Are you Doctor Huerta?' Yes, I am.' Doctor Huerta, let me please introduce myself, I'm so-and-so, I listen to your show every day; your television programs are great.' And everybody said, Oh, my God. Who are you?' "

It is a question Huerta, the founder and director of the Cancer Risk Assessment and Screening Center at the Washington Hospital Center, is asking himself these days. "I'm a physician that's being taken by media, bit by bit," he admits. He's a prominent figure on Spanish-language radio and television, with shows that blanket the Washington area and reach approximately 75 percent of Latinos in the United States -- 10 million to 15 million people -- and even extend into Latin America. Huerta has gone from being an unknown Peruvian doctor a decade ago to a recognized national health celebrity for the long-neglected Latino community.

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His daily two-minute health radio broadcast, "Cuidando su Salud" ("Taking Care of Your Health"), airs on 27 Spanish-language stations across the United States -- including the 10 largest markets except Los Angeles -- and in 21 Latin American countries (through the news programs of the Organization of American States). His hour-long local version of "Cuidando su Salud," a call-in radio show airing Sundays on WILC-AM (900) since 1993, has an audience of about 200,000 people. His local hour-long cable television show, "Hablemos de Salud" ("Let's Talk About Health"), which is shown Saturdays at WNVC (Channel 56), will soon go into syndication. And he is now working with the National Institutes of Health to develop additional radio programs.

"It's my hobby," he says of this media mess. "It's what I do on weekends."

His hobby has made him famous. He is often mobbed at D.C. United soccer games. "They give me sandwiches," he says. "You see, in Latin America, you give your doctors things . . . It's very embarrassing."

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Such attention shows that he is succeeding, showing people how to live longer, healthier, cancer-free. There is numerical evidence for that success: Whenever Huerta mentions the National Cancer Institute's hot line on the air, the number of Spanish calls increases dramatically.

Huerta -- a size Small 45-year-old with glasses and a bristly mustache -- is not the sort who conventionally inspires mass adulation. An immigrant to the United States in 1989, he is committed to helping the sometimes uninsured, sometimes language-blocked Latino community.

"If you're poor in this country, the worst thing that can happen to you is to get sick," he says. "You're screwed." But preventive care is cheap, he adds. The problem is getting that message across -- what one should or should not be doing, when to see a doctor -- amid a surfeit of "quackery" and often-misguided traditional medicine.

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"Doctor Huerta is not only a doctor but a priest," says Beatriz Rebollo of Alexandria, one of his loyal listeners and viewers. Huerta, she says, not only gives advice but speaks about the condition of being human. "In Latin America, doctors aren't doctors unless they cure. He's making a campaign to avoid the need to cure."

Rebollo, 40, a Bolivian Embassy official, says that Huerta is tremendously popular with the Latino community in Washington -- including her two young sons, who, after listening to his repeated warnings, persuaded her to visit his cancer center for an assessment. (She was pronounced healthy.) Such success is the result of simple presentation, free of scientific terms. "He uses a very clear and accessible Spanish. He speaks with conviction and with confidence in his profession."

Since 75 percent of cancer is preventable or detectable, Huerta says, the media-based, get-out-the-word approach is increasingly seen as critical. "The media is now part of the artillery," he says.

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Luis Quintanilla, program director of Radio Unica, on KIQI in San Francisco, where Huerta is heard by more than a half-million people daily, says that "the people respond 100 percent." The program is particularly valued, he says, among the poor, who often have no other source of advice. Not only does the station broadcast the two-minute health messages twice daily, but Huerta goes on the air every Monday for a half-hour to take calls from Bay Area listeners.

On the air, Huerta speaks with a remarkable empathy for callers, in a Spanish free of regional or idiomatic expressions. Off the air, talking about "his passion," he is both utterly serious about the cancer threat and gleeful about the possibility of diminishing it -- the elation of a boy fiddling with Legos instead of people.

He delights in coming up with prosaic lessons about, say, "the five P's of media" -- popular, personal, pervasive, persuasive and profitable -- and in insouciantly teasing the scientific community. Saying devilishly, "I showed this at the Mayo Clinic. They loooved this," he shows a reporter a computer graphic of a spire labeled "Ivory Tower of Science," with alien beings wearing lab coats atop it. Clouds form beneath the tower and itty-bitty people icons materialize below, cut off from the wonders of science. In his shows, Huerta works at blowing away those clouds.

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As a doctor in Peru, Huerta became interested in public health through soap operas. His poorly educated patients, who only sought out a doctor after their herb-wrapped tumors were inoperably large, had never heard of mammograms or Pap smears. But they knew about the latest soap operas and the Top 40 songs. "They were exposed to media," he says. "That's what clicked in my mind."

He began making educational programs in Peru and later in the United States, started composing the two-minute health bulletins and distributing them free to any interested Spanish-language radio stations. The messages are sometimes simple bits of advice -- smoking is harmful, don't abuse alcohol, proper nutrition is essential -- sometimes reminders of the importance of mental health or summaries of medical journal findings. During Breast Cancer Awareness month, for example, he broadcast an entire month of messages about the disease. The sound snippets are the medical conscience for millions of Latinos.

Huerta says his hope is to obtain a paying job in media in order to concentrate more on public health while still spending a third of his time examining patients. "They're my focus groups," he says. "They tell me what to tell."

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He pulls out a couple of loose-leaf pages, scrawled on with a red marker, from a plastic binder. They are a Chilean woman's record, in poor Spanish, of her monthly breast self-examinations -- a procedure Huerta taught her.

"This is my payment," he says with determination. "This is behavior change. It's what I pursue when I do my shows." CAPTION: Elmer Huerta fields questions at WILC Radio in Laurel. His public health messages are directed at those with no other source of medical advice. CAPTION: Reaching out to listeners: Elmer Huerta at WILC Radio in Laurel.

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