That mindset continues after death. Families will clean and dress the bodies of their loved ones. They’ll caress, kiss, and embrace them. Spouses might even spend a night next to their deceased partners. Through these bonds of affection, Ebola, which spreads through bodily fluids, can easily jump from one host into an entire family. The worst thing about the virus is not its deeply exaggerated bloodiness, but its ability to corrupt the bonds of community. It is a pathogen well suited to a world where sickness and death are met with touch and affection.

To bill these choices and practices, and others like them, as superstitions is misguided. These are the result of deeply held religious and cultural beliefs. “If you’re asking someone to not do the typical thing they do to grieve and mourn, you need to provide an appropriate alternative that achieves the same cultural end,” says Maimuna Majumder, an epidemiologist at MIT. “That’s usually the piece that goes missing. You can’t do that if you’re othering these kinds of practices.”

Fortunately, the Ministry of Health understands that.“We can’t forcibly prevent family members from touching a [patient],” says the spokesperson Jessica Ilunga. “So we’ve been really stepping up our community-engagement activities, by involving traditional and religious leaders. They have a huge influence on the community.”

That is how outbreaks are contained—without community buy-in, resources and fancy new technology won’t be enough. Unlike most of the Congo’s previous outbreaks, mobile laboratories are now operating, allowing researchers to confirm possible cases faster. As I reported on Monday, accurate digital maps are being made. Tablets with freely available software allow field workers to enter and compare data in real time without having to rely on printed paper. And most excitingly, health workers are starting to deploy an experimental vaccine called rVSV-ZEBOV.

The vaccine has been lauded as a “game changer”—and rightly so. In over 40 years of Ebola outbreaks, never has such a tool been available from the start. But it is still understudied in the field, and its existence doesn’t guarantee victory against the outbreak. A recent New York Times editorial, which somehow managed to describe a crisis whose case numbers are still growing as “contained,” also billed the vaccine’s use as “the first time Ebola was met with more than just the crude tools of quarantine and hospice care.”

“Of course you want vaccines, but yellow fever and cholera are perfect examples of disease where we have vaccines and still get raging outbreaks,” says Nahid Bhadelia, a physician at Boston University who helped to tackle Ebola in Sierra Leone. “We still need the public-health pillars.”

By that she means: finding infected people and tracking their contacts; ensuring hygienic practices that keep infections from spreading; and engaging with communities. These are old-school measures. Public Health 101. But they’re also the bedrock of any outbreak response. They’re vital for diseases that have no available vaccines or treatments, like Lassa fever, which is currently breaking out in Liberia, or Nipah, which has risen again in India. And they’re still vital when vaccines are available.