According to the Hollywood Reporter, director Ridley Scott, along with producer Lynda Obst, is developing an Ebola outbreak limited series for Fox TV Studios based on Richard Preston's best-selling high school reading assignment The Hot Zone. Preston will apparently have a new story in this week's New Yorker about the virus' spread from West Africa to the U.S.

"I think it's the speed with which it kills that makes the disease so frightening," Obst told THR. "People hoped it would stay in some remote part of the world. But that's a fantasy in the modern world. The modern world makes us one big connected family."

Scott and Obst are working on optioning Preston's forthcoming article and the author will work with them in developing the series before it is shopped to networks. The adaptation of Preston's Hot Zone (which also started as a New Yorker story) was apparently originally conceived as a feature film directed by Scott with Jodie Foster lined up to star.

Please share your casting ideas in the comments. I'll start: Sigourney Weaver as the harried (but brilliant!) CDC doctor who saves us all from Ebola...but dies from the virus herself.

[Image via AP]