All said that Western countries needed to help generously, especially those with long ties to affected nations: the United States to Liberia, Britain to Sierra Leone and France to Guinea. Their militaries may be useful, as long as they only deliver supplies, set up field hospitals, provide electricity and communications — and avoid anything that involves brandishing weapons, including enforcing quarantines.

The experts were universally appalled at the sight of rural areas hemmed by roadblocks and a slum in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, with barbed wire that made residents believe they were being locked in to die; they were even more appalled that soldiers used truncheons and bullets during what was supposed to be a public health effort. On Friday, the government said the quarantine of the slum, West Point, would be lifted on Saturday morning.

“People are going to break out — and a lot may get killed if they try,” said Dr. Peter L. Roeder, a British veterinarian who directed the final eradication campaign against rinderpest, a lethal cattle disease that led millions of Africans to starve to death in the 1890s and was declared eradicated in 2011. In that fight, he said, “if you went in heavy-handed and slapped on a quarantine, people just ran away with their cattle and dispersed the disease.”

To prevent panic, respected leaders must quell rumors, as Dr. Lee did. West Africa is not Taiwan; there are nearly 100 tribal languages, literacy is low and televisions rare. Radio is useful, experts said, but the key is to get trusted local leaders like chiefs, clerics, midwives and traditional healers to do the job. Ebola survivors “should be publicized,” one expert said, “so people understand that they don’t have to die if they come in for care.”

Pay is also an issue, experts said. Health workers taking huge risks must be compensated, and so must their families if they die.

Aziz Memon, a Pakistani textile executive who helps lead the fight against polio for the international Rotary Club, noted that when Taliban gunmen killed polio vaccinators in his country two years ago, vaccinators’ pay was doubled; for those in the riskiest areas, it quadrupled. To the families of those murdered, Rotary paid $10,000 in compensation.