I was a health educator--I need to post this
I'm reposting this from chilimuffin; I hadn't heard it before. But it's important info. If anyone knows anything related (either backing it up or contradicting it!), please comment
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However, I also remembered Harold McGee using various forms of plastic food wrap in persimmon-ripening experiments in one of his culinary books, so I consulted that, which led me to 1) Wikipedia for various types of plastic wrap materials, and 2) two journals: Polymer and The Journal of Food Science (but I don't have the citations today..... I'll see if I can dig them up). Those gave me ideas on the porosity and thickness of various materials, which turns out to be related to the standards to which a particular polymer is made (logical, but it hadn't occurred to me). Polyvinylidene chloride (the original) is really quite impermeable, and if you can find someone who still makes it (perhaps a lab source), you could get a rather large roll of it and tear it off to size. I've heard from fellow cooks that "freeze-tite" a product by the makers of "stretch-tite" is "almost as good as the old saran," but that's for freezing cakes, not safe sex, so I can't make any claims other than food preservation.
LD polyethylene is far more permeable to water and other molecules (did you ever do the science experiment where you took different brands and put them over glasses of water for a week? anyway.....). Moreover, while it's a "good-fair" resistor to oil-induced breakdown, it's not completely resistant (nor is latex, admittedly). (citation).
A search of PubMed, as well as UpToDate, Micromedix, and MD Consult yielded nothing. I won't go off on a tangent about the paucity of studies on non-procreative sexual health.
So, the herpesviridae are 150 nm in size, approximately, retroviruses are about 120 nm, and HPV is tiny, at around 50 nm (a href="http://student.ccbcmd.edu/courses/bio141/lecguide/unit3/viruses/classvir.html">citation, though any virology book could also be used). As the straight dope pointed out in the '90s, latex gloves are not made to the same standards as condoms, which makes condoms inherently safer than gloves. Why then, do we even bother saying "cut up a glove to be a dental dam?" Well, honestly, now that I've seen that, I'm not sure. I haven't looked any further into the matter, however. At least, not yet.
Okay, so a water molecule is about 0.01 nm (Wiki), which is clearly much smaller than HSV. So even if a plastic film isn't water-tight, it might still be virus-tight. True. And I don't know the size of most onion odor particles (dipropyl disulfide is still pretty small, but I don't know others), so I can't guess as to how they relate to viral particles, though I imagine it's along the same lines as water.
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