MONROVIA, Liberia — It is hard enough to push away family and friends, shunning an embrace or even a shake of the hand to protect yourself from Ebola.

But imagine trying not to touch your 2-year-old daughter when she is feverish, vomiting blood and in pain.

Precious Diggs, a 33-year-old contractor for a rubber company, had heard all the warnings from the legions of public health workers here in Liberia. She had seen the signs that dot the road from Harbel, where she works, to the capital, Monrovia, some 35 miles away: “Ebola is Here and Real!” they say. “Stop the Denial!”

But when her toddler, Rebecca, started “toileting and vomiting,” there was no way her mother was not going to pick her up.

“Na mind, baby,” Ms. Diggs whispered in her baby’s ear. “I beg you, na mind.”

Here in the heart of the worst Ebola outbreak in history, the question of whether to touch a stranger has only one answer: You don’t. But even in more intimate circles, in families and among lifelong friends, Liberians are starting to pull away from one another, straining against generations of a culture in which closeness is expressed through physical contact.

Liberia — from the elite doyennes who spend their days sending houseboys to the market to fetch oranges for them, all the way to the young boys on Tubman Boulevard who run up to cars hawking plastic bags of ice — used to be a tactile place. Everybody kissed friends, strangers and cousins, regardless of whether people met every day or had not seen one another in 20 years.

In a version of the genteel affectations that freed American slaves brought with them two centuries ago when they came here, the double-cheek kiss, for decades, was the standard greeting.