Fox's television studio has been developing an adaptation of the best-selling 1994 Ebola chronicle The Hot Zone for more than a year, the Twenty-First Century Fox Inc-owned company said last week.

"It's a strange and upsetting coincidence that we all happen to be experiencing this current scare, and we're of course extremely sensitive about it," says executive producer Lynda Obst, who is developing the project with Fox TV Studios and Alien director Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions.

If the adaptation of Richard Preston's nonfiction thriller about viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola makes it into production, it will likely be as a limited-run series, Fox TV Studios said. The book describes the discovery of a virus related to Ebola in a primate quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, in 1989.