Security problem.

Hi folks! I am running a site on a red hat linux 6.2 machine (using apache) on which many others have user accounts. I have built the site with php3 and mysql. I would like only authorized people to access the database, and so i have implemented authentication in php using passwords stored in the mysql database. Actually the database has a single table with each row corresponding to a particular user. The authorized people have permissions to update the database. The problem is that i have written the mysql db username and password in clear text, in the php scripts. So the users on local machine can have a look at the scripts (which are world readable) and then connect to the database using their own scripts and .... Is there any way to get around this problem? Thanks Anand