WASHINGTON?President Bush selected an Arizona trauma surgeon and sheriff’s deputy to be surgeon general and a top administrator at Johns Hopkins University to direct the National Institutes of Health, Tuesday.

Richard Carmona of Tucson and Hopkins’ Elias Zerhouni must be confirmed by the Senate before filling the two top health positions.

Zerhouni said he never dreamt of such a privilege when he and his wife immigrated here from Algeria 27 years ago.

Carmona’s voice cracked as he alternated between Spanish and English, he called his own nomination the American dream for “a high-school dropout and poor Hispanic kid.”

A part-time public health professor, Carmona has expertise in emergency preparedness and weapons of mass destruction.

Bush has been looking for a surgeon general ever since David Satcher’s term ended last month.