A personal rule that I think we should ALL follow is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", no matter how much comfort or righteous indignation you can feel by believing in something. Those of you with a background in science should be especially aware of this. It really helps keep you from believing in some rather dumb things.
For example, I recently came across a claim about a pandemic in Ukraine being caused by a bio-weapon being produced by Baxter Intl's Ukraine's Lab. This clearly counts as an "extraordinary claim", though I was surprised at the number of people willing to accept the rumor as most likely true without any investigation. An unusual "pandemic of pneumonic plague hitting the Ukraine" should be something easy to prove, so I'm going to remain skeptical until I hear some other evidence confirming that such a thing exists.
By the way, it would be really nice if anyone reporting on wild rumors would do the rest of us a favor and at least include a comment on what www.snopes.com has to say about it so that we don't all have to look it up ourselves. Unfortunately, www.snopes.com doesn't have anything to say on this one way or another yet. However, according to Wikipedia the "WHO (World Health Organization) issued a statement that there were no significant differences between the pandemic H1N1 strain, and the Ukrainian strains tested", and stated reports that the "mass refusal by Ukrainians to be vaccinated (after several persons allegedly died after vaccinations in 2008 and 2009) was partly the cause for the epidemic." In other words, what apparently happened is that Ukraine got hit by a bad outbreak of H1N1 because people refused vaccinations. At least that's the most viable explanation pending further evidence.
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