WASHINGTON — State health officials were heartened when President Barack Obama this month asked Congress for $1.8 billion to combat the spread of the Zika virus because they fear they don't have the resources to fight the potentially debilitating disease on their own.

Budget cuts have left state and local health departments seriously understaffed and, officials say, in a precariously dangerous situation if the country has to face outbreaks of two or more infectious diseases, such as Zika, new strains of flu, or the West Nile and Ebola viruses, at the same time.

“We have been lucky,” said James Blumenstock of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, of states' and localities' ability to contain the flu, West Nile and Ebola threats of the last five years.

“Not only have the last major threats not been as severe as they might have been, they have also been sequential,” Blumenstock said. “The issue is: What if the next pandemic is not as mild as the last ones? What if more than one of them happens at once?”

States to varying degrees have cut back spending on public health since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Overall state spending on public health fell by $1.3 billion between 2008 and 2014, two health research organizations — the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — reported last year.

And the trend didn't end as the economy improved. Sixteen states reduced spending between fiscal 2013 and 2015, the two organizations said in another report. Those were the same years the nation faced Ebola, a new outbreak of West Nile, and, in 2014, widespread cases of the H3N2 flu strain.

States with the biggest cuts over that time were California (13.3 percent), Massachusetts (11.6 percent) and Washington (11.1 percent). Six states — Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington — cut their spending all three years.

Local health departments have suffered, too. They lost nearly 52,000 staff positions as a result of hiring freezes and budget cuts between 2008 and 2014, the National Association of County and City Health Officials said.

“The steady reduction in public health funding has resulted in a progressive erosion of manpower and the capacity to do the kind of work that would be optimal,” said Jeff Duchin, chief medical officer in Seattle and King County. “Quite frankly, we just don't have the staff we need.”

If Congress approves the president's request for money, funds would go to eradicating the mosquitoes that spread it, research into vaccines, and public education about prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported at least 92 confirmed cases in the United States, including the U.S. territories. In almost every case, the patients are believed to have been infected by mosquitoes, either abroad or at home in Puerto Rico.

The mosquito that transmits the virus, the Aedes aegypti, breeds in the United States and the rest of the Americas, and is also a carrier of dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. Scientists say that with international travel and Zika outbreaks in more than two dozen Latin American countries, it is inevitable that mosquitoes carrying Zika will surface here.