zabbix-frontend-php can not handle passwords with special characters (like double quotes)

Steps to reproduce:

sudo aptitude install zabbix-frontend-php
Walk through the configuration steps. I used a randomly generated password via keepass. It happened to contain the sequence " double-quotes", "closing curly brace" ("}).

Observed behaviour:
When navigating to http://<foo>/zabbix, i got a blank page. /var/log/apache2/error.log showed mysql refused my password. sudo vim /etc/zabbix/dbconfig.php showed why -- password is not escaped.

Expected behaviour:
Allow -any- password to be used.

lsb_release -rd:
Description: Ubuntu 11.04
Release: 11.04

Using zabbix-frontend-php 1.8.3-2u, freshly installed today.