HANOI, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam has succeeded in making a new kind of vaccines against rabies using a cell-growing technique, local newspaper Young People reported Wednesday.

    The new vaccines, having stronger safety indicator than the existing locally-produced ones, will be put into use widely in 2007, the paper quoted Vice Director of Vietnam's National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology Nguyen Thi Hong Hanh as saying.

    However, the World Health Organization has warned that rabies vaccines made in Vietnam show limits in their effectiveness.

    Vietnam has annually imported more than 100,000 doses of rabies vaccines in recent years, Hanh said.

    Nearly 5.9 million people in Vietnam have been bitten by rabies-infected dogs or cats in the last 10 years, much higher than the figure in the pre-1996 period, according to the country's Health Ministry.

    Vietnam, with a population of over 83 million, is encouraging vaccinations among people and dogs in a bid to contain the disease in 2010 and eradicate it by 2015.