Since last spring I have watched this stupid virus take over my blog as well as three countries in West Africa that the world hasn't bothered its pretty head over in years.

The WHO map above dates from September 16, but it's the most recent I can find in a usable format. A few provinces or counties may have fallen to Ebola in the last two weeks, but the interesting aspect of this map is the blank areas. And I want to know why they're still blank.

From a single case last December, Ebola spread across part of eastern Guinea, then jumped to Conakry, the capital on the coast. A few months later it was in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where it has spread and intensified in some areas but not in others.

A terrified civil servant took Ebola to Nigeria, and a Guinean student took it to Dakar in Senegal. But it's fizzled out in those countries, and we owe their health ministries a unanimous vote of thanks. It remains stuck in three countries where cases are apparently doubling every three weeks. Maybe more, depending on the mendacity and surveillance capacity of the governments involved.

If anything, Ebola's biggest allies are now the governments that insist on flying their infected nationals home to the US or Spain or France. On its own ground, Ebola is showing a surprising lack of enterprise.

Why hasn't it migrated to every village in West Africa the way cholera did in Haiti in 2010? Why hasn't someone sick staggered across a border into Cote d'Ivoire or Mali seeking help, as Guineans and Sierra Leoneans staggered into Liberia last spring?

These aren't trick questions. I'm clueless about this. Amid all the uproar where Ebola is, someone should be looking into what's going on where Ebola isn't.