Desribe one problem that scientists must overcome to develop a vaccine for HIV?

Biology help

"The ability of HIV to mutate rapidly remains one of the biggest obstacles to a successful vaccine. Its genetic material is prone to errors during duplication and replicating HIV molecules frequently exchange pieces of genes. Because of this instability and the potentially rapid life cycle of the virus, the genetic sequences of HIV particles in a single person can be as diverse as those of all the influenza viruses in the world. A vaccine that produces an immune response against one HIV sequence may have no effect on other strains."

That's a quote from a good article in Scientific American Body magazine that lays out the problems that have been encountered in the search for an HIV vaccine. Here's the article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=wher...

One big problem with HIV is that it changes itself all the time. They need to define the virus and know everything its made of and what it does in our bodies and how our bodies immune system responds to it. Thats how they figure out how to trick our bodies into making our own antibodies with a vaccine. Its just that the HIV never is the same it keeps morphing into different strains.

The HIV is a virus the uses a host cell in our body.There for hides by using the DNA is our normal cell to multiple.The HIV virus contains RNA only and needs the DNA to replicate.
Besides they will never find a vaccine for HIV it makes to much money for pharmaceutical companies. Same thing with cancer, don't believe what you hear. For instance turn on your tv, watch how many commercials come on within the hour on pharmecutical ads. There are alot they try to brain wash the Americans to think its ok to take a pill.
Im sorry I got off your subject. It is a problem for scientist to develop a vaccine because of the mutation process.

The HIV virus has an envelope that's made out of the same stuff as the membranes of human cells. To the immune system, it doesn't look like a foreign invader.