Traditional West African funerals, at which mourners extensively touch and kiss the dead, are “superspreader” events for transmission of the Ebola virus, says a new study, which identified hygienic burial practices of those who have succumbed to the infection as the single-most effective way to slow the epidemic.

A team that included researchers from Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare also concluded that a government-imposed quarantine of the West Point slum in Monrovia, which lasted 10 days and galvanized an angry community backlash, did little to slow the spread of the Ebola virus.

The cordon sanitaire, imposed by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and enforced by Liberian police, “may have even been detrimental, given the civil unrest” touched off by the measures, the study said.

The new research, published Thursday in Science Magazine, uses mathematical models to assess the relative effect of a range of measures that would stem transmission of the Ebola virus. Epidemiologists from Oregon State University, Yale University and Liberia’s public health agency found that the practice of washing, touching and kissing the dead in preparation for burial was the single-most potent factor in escalating the rate at which the virus was transmitted in the early days of the outbreak.

The broader adoption of safe burial practices thus would do most to de-escalate transmission, they reasoned.

Such practices include disinfecting the cadaver before it is placed in a plastic body bag, which would then also be disinfected.

But the abandonment of the region’s funereal tradition will not by itself cause the rate of infection to decline far enough for Liberia’s epidemic to burn itself out, the authors of the study concluded. For that to happen, the Ebola virus’ reproductive rate — the number of people infected by each person sick with Ebola — would have to drop to below 1.