Picture the scene: you've organised a week off work for some much-needed R&R. On the first day of your holiday, you're struck down with the flu. Instead of sunning it up on the beach, you spend the entire week coughing up phlegm in bed.

If you'd been at work, you definitely would have called in sick on these days - so why should annual leave be any different? Let's take a look at the legalities.

We've all been there. We head to work even though we're under the weather. It's such a big problem that it's gotten a name -- "presenteeism" -- and it's costing companies billions of dollars. Here's why you should just stay home when you're ill, and why it's in your boss's best interest.

Being sick is terrible. The act of calling into work sick might actually be worse. There's the fear that your boss would think you're faking it (considering 81 per cent of full-time works have "chucked a sickie", who can blame them?). You also have to worry about your co-workers resenting you for putting more work on their plate. If you're genuinely sick, here are a few tips to call in sick without ruining your work reputation.

Feeling ill? Well, staying at home would seem to be the sensible course of action. Yet for many, going to work while sick has become the norm, even a necessity in the face of the pressures placed on us by the organisations which employ us.

Be it because you're hungover, need a holiday or just really not in the mood to work, most of us have taken a sick day off even when we're not ill. In fact, 81 per cent of Australian full-time workers have faked sickness to get out of work at least once in their careers, according to a new survey. We suspect 19 per cent are lying.

Although we know influenza viruses circulate in temperate, populated parts of Australia every winter, predicting the precise timing and relative intensity of flu seasons is a fraught undertaking. Still, this doesn't deter people from making predictions. And when predictions mainly rely on data from notification of influenza cases to health authorities, each year seems more dire than the last.