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Cape Town - Twenty eight percent of South Africa's workers took time off last year due to respiratory illnesses, including flu, statistics released on Monday showed.
This is down slightly from the same period in 2005, when 30.9% of the same sample of employees took time off due to flu and respiratory illness.
This is according to CAM Solutions. The statistical software company analyses almost 100 000 employees in more than 60 South African companies.
Of the 100 000 employees, more than 7 000 provided diagnosis information. The data was analysed over a one year period, from March 2006 to February 2007, and collected from sick certificates issued by doctors.
Johnson said: "The statistics show that there were 3 877 incidents of sick leave due to flu and respiratory illness out of a total of 13 605 incidents of sick absenteeism altogether in the last year.
"An incident refers to one episode of absenteeism, regardless of (how) many days the employee was off work.
"We also know that the average incident of flu lasted 2.4 days, the same amount of time per flu incident that employees took off the year before.
"So the average duration of sick leave due to flu and respiratory illness has remained the same, despite slightly less (2.9%) people being sick for these reasons this year.
"Absence due to flu and respiratory illness hits about a third of the workforce every year and, according to our statistics, has remained fairly consistent over the last six years.
"Although we will never be able to control flu and respiratory illness completely, encouraging a healthy workforce through wellness programmes and initiatives has helped."
"Companies on wellness programmers have been known to show significant decreases in their incidents of absenteeism," Johnson added.