First the bad news...

Two pieces of news I thought were worth mentioning.

As many of you might be aware, American Medical News has announced that their online news will only be available to AMA members as of June of this year. I add my voice to those many med bloggers (eg. KevinMD, MedGadget and GruntDoc) who have expressed disappointment in the AMA for this position. AMed News has up to now provided an extremely useful service for updating both physicians and the public on important issues related to healthcare.

Personally, I find this approach incomprehensible. Limiting availability to AMA members does nothing to lower the fixed costs of operating this online newsletter. In addition it is extremely unlikely that revenues will rise due to this decision. I can't imagine anyone joining the AMA simply to get access to AMed News.

I can only hope they will reconsider what I find to be an inexplicable business decision.

On the plus side, the FDA has recently made public an RSS newsfeed for "agency news releases and other press announcements". The feed is:

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/news/rssPress.xml

There is already one for product recalls:

http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/rssRecalls.xml

Happy aggregating!