Health Canada has put its seal of approval on the use of the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine Cervarix, which provides women the protection against human papillomavirus, or HPV - a family of viruses that are the root cause of cervical cancer.

Aimed basically at girls and women aged between 10 and 25 years, Cervarix will protect against cervical cancers and abnormal and precancerous cervical lesions; and will likely hit Canada’s medical store shelves by the end of February.

Cervarix will be the country’s second vaccine for cervical cancer – the other one being Merck Canada’s Gardasil, which has been available in the Canadian market since 2006. Both the vaccines have more or less the same retail price of almost $400, and both require three doses.

While Gardasil provides protection against infection with four strains of HPV - 6, 11, 16 and 18; the newly-approved Cervarix protects against infection with mainly two HPV strains -16, 18; as well as with 31, 33 and 45 strains.

Commenting on the comparison between Gardasil and Cervarix, Barbara Romanowski, an infectious diseases specialist at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, said: “The vaccines are different but we can’t say one is clearly better than the other because we have no clinical head-to-head studies.”

Nonetheless, Romanowski also added that while Cervarix offers “superb protection for cervical cancer,” Gardasil offers “very good protection for cervical cancer and genital warts.”