Most of us get very close to our horses and either one of us is up in the others's face a lot. Can humans contract diseases or illnesses from their animals?

A simple answer to your question is yes, we can get sick through contact with our horses. These diseases are rare but we still have to know them right? Here are the diseases that we could catch from horses, visit this page (http://horses.about.com/od/basiccare/a/zoonoses.htm).

Now that's a scary thought, something that hadn't occurred to me before. I would guess that common sense and basic hygiene would keep you safe from certain of the illnesses but others would be unavoidable in the same way as it's hard to avoid colds in the winter.

I didn't know that humans could catch diseases from animals, other than things like parasitic infections. That's rather a scary thought, though. Thanks for the link to learn more about this.

Thanks for the link. I'd heard before that you can catch west nile and equine encephalitis, and of course e coli and parasites, but I didn't know about the others. The most important thing is to practice good hygiene.

This kind of disease transfer is very rare. Make sure that your horse is healthy and you won't get these diseases. Cleanliness will also prevent the transfer of disease. As the saying says "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure."

Make sure your horse is healthy how exactly? Even if I believed that they worked perfectly there are not vaccines that cover each and every illness that a horse could get. And you can't often tell that a horse is getting sick during the pro-dome of the illness, so you just can't be that sure.

My goodness! I never would have thought of that. Not only can you get sick, but from the sounds of it you can catch very serious illnesses from your horses. I wonder if this is the case with other animals too?

As a previous poster said and you'll find by exploring the link given above, this sort of thing is very rare. As long as you care properly for your horse on a daily basis and they have routine vet exams, you should not have an issue.