Now:
"The imitations are never perfect, but they are informative. Last year, an interdisciplinary team from Stony Brook University, in New York, exposed human lung cells and mouse brain cells to dust samples that resemble the regolith found in the lunar highlands and on the moon’s volcanic plains.
Compared with less-reactive particulate materials, the toxic dust caused more genetic mutations and cell death, raising the specter of moondust triggering neurodegeneration and cancer in future lunar explorers.
“The DNA is being damaged, so there is a risk of those types of things happening,” says Rachel Caston, a molecular biologist who led the research. (She’s now at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.)"
Then:
"They were called the “dusty dozen” for good reason. The 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972 kicked up so much moondust that the powdery sediment got lodged in every nook and cranny of their space suits. Caked in the stuff, the astronauts inadvertently tracked the toxic dust into their spacecraft and even back down to Earth upon landing.
These NASA astronauts complained of a “lunar hay fever” that irritated their eyes, lungs, and nostrils. A doctor who helped the Apollo 11 crew members emerge from their dust-scattered space module following its ocean splashdown experienced allergic reactions of his own. “Dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, said during a postflight debriefing. “I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems, except dust.”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/...ng-on-the-moon