GENEVA: The death rate in the Ebola epidemic raging in west Africa has reached around 70 percent, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

“What we’re finding is 70 percent mortality,” said Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general of the WHO.

UN also said dozens of Ebola survivors, now immune to the deadly disease, will meet in Sierra Leone this week to see how they can help tackle the epidemic.

They can assist sufferers because they have experienced the stigmatization caused by the disease and have endured being treated in an isolation ward, Christophe Boulierac, spokesman for the UN’s children’s aid agency UNICEF, said.

The survivors will gather on Thursday and Friday in Kemena, in southeast Sierra Leone, after the government decided to delay it by one day.

“It’s an innovative move to enlist people who are immune to Ebola in Sierra Leone in the fight against the disease. It will bring together 35 people who recovered from Ebola, and some practitioners,” Boulierac told reporters in Geneva.

He said more gatherings were in the pipeline, noting that last month UNICEF had said it eventually hoped to connect 2,500 survivors. The Kenema meeting, involving people from the local area, has been organized by Sierra Leone with backing from UNICEF and the US Centers for Disease Control.

The Kenema survivors will have sessions with experts in psychosocial support and mental health.

“The goal is both to help these survivors cope with stigmatization and to rebuild their lives, but also to identify those among them who want to, and can, advise health and community workers currently involved in the fight against Ebola, and notably in dealing with people in quarantine,” the spokesman added.

In addition, the plan is to pick out individuals to work as counsellors in communities and treatment centers.

World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic, just back from west Africa, said he had been impressed by the attitude of survivors.